Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent:
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
There were many human groups that did not go to war; the Eskimos never grasped the idea at all, and the American Indians never took to it well. But these dissenters were wiped out, and a cultural patt...
Am an outsider in my own country.
We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ou...
We came back [from Mars], Pris said, because nobody should have to live there. It wasn't conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It's so old. You feel it in the stones, t...
Tomorrow morning, he decided, I'll begin clearing away the sand of fifty thousand centuries for my first vegetable garden. That's the initial step.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe.
Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (...
On one hand she seems so agile, so athletic, and yet I've seen her appear so awkward that it embarrassed me. She gives the impression of a hard, worldly adroitness, and in some situations she's like a...
Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead...
In a one-party system there is always a landslide.
If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we've done in our lifetime—we'd drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren't made to understand what they do.
I'm sorry, Leon said. I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe they're flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I an...
How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just - change.With nothing causing it.
Guilt is useless. The world torments us, and we react by tormenting ourselves. I wonder how we can ever have such a low opinion of ourselves that we join in.
Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back...
Everything is true, he said. Everything anybody has ever thought.
Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the...