Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in all law schools.
Some people insist that ‘mediocre’ is better than ‘best.’ They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none. Pfah!
Some people are ants by nature; they have to work, even when it’s useless. Few people have a talent for constructive laziness.
Smith felt distressed at the failure to respond in kind and interpreted it as failure on his own part. He realized miserably that, time after time, he had managed to bring agitation to these other cre...
Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of pol...
Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.
Or maybe he was seeing double. Bad stuff, gin. Should ‘ave switched to rum a long time ago. Good stuff, rum. You could drink it, or take a bath in it. No, that was gin — he meant Joe.
One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die ...and accepts his sentence undismayed.
No one ever does anything but what he wants to do—'enjoys'—within the possibilities open to him. If I change a tire, it's because I enjoy it more than being stranded.
My only regret involved the sad knowledge that I could not handle the amount of alcohol I would have enjoyed. Easy is the descent into Hell.
My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So...
Money problems can always be solved by a man not frightened by them.
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Locked you in a padded cell, with a certificate signed by three doctors, and allowed you mail on alternate leap years.
Life is short, but the years are long.
Let's skip [Mobile Infantry] tradition for a moment. Can you think of anything sillier than being fired out of a spaceship with nothing but mayhem and sudden death at the other end? However, if someon...
Jill... had explained homosexuality, after Mike had read about it and failed to grok--and had given him rules for avoiding passes; she knew that Mike, pretty as he was, would attract such. He had foll...
Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to do, every time. If it sometimes pains them to make a choice - if the choice turns o...
Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy—in fact, they’re almost incompati...
I’ve never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith—it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.