Our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preservin...
True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter...
Damn right I voted for him. But if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn't have cast a vote—I’d have cast a brick.
You don’t bother to memorise the literature—you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.
It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long...
COINCIDENCE You weren't playing attention to the other half of what was going on.
Is this an unforgivable invasion of privacy? Invasion of privacy it is; unforgivable ...Well, do you believe that justice shall not only be done, but shall be seen to be done? The privacy my worm is d...
Only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.)
The book has one of the scariest mise-en-scènes in all of science fiction: a world that is a smothering, riotous tangle of human arms and limbs. Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics...
Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.
Is our society on the right lines when of of its most gifted people can find no better career than crime unless literally millions per year of public money are lavished on him?
First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we’re going to have the brain race.
A REMARKABLE INSTANCE ON THE PUBLIC SCALE OF THE REAL-LIFE IMPLEMENTATION OF XAVIER CONROY’S DICTUM ABOUT THE PERFECTLY DEFENDED MAN Following Paraguay’s declaration of independence from Spain Dr. Fra...
The same computers that make it impossible for you to cheat on your income tax can ensure that the blood of your group is in the ambulance that picks you up from a car smash.
A sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can’t keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines.
Take it for granted that the government will disregard long-term dangers-such as those affecting the environment-in order to cling to power; that the citizenry will do the same because thinking is too...
Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND...
I don’t think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of occasional dangerous mistakes.
I am I. Tat tvam asi.
When you think about the history of liberty. It’s the story of how principle has gradually been elevated above the whim of tyrants. When the law was defined as more powerful than the king, that was on...