When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.
What is ‘truth’? Mike asked. (What is Truth? asked a Roman judge, and washed his hands of a troublesome question. Jubal wished that he could do likewise.)
What distinguishes Buddhism from any other faith I’ve studied—from most human beings, really—is that the people who face the wall and the people who face away from it have never fought a war over it....
We’re simply trying to survive—and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what’s possible.
War is a simple matter compared with revolution. War is an applied science, with well-defined principles tested in history; analogous solutions may be found from ballista to H-bomb. But every revoluti...
This very personal relationship, ‘value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is a...
These people who deal in fancification to fool the public think nobody can read and write but themselves.
There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal, in the end.
There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured.
There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown ch...
There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.
The way to live a long time—oh, a thousand years or more—is something between the way a child does it and the way a mature man does it. Give the future enough thought to be ready for it—but don’t worr...
The way to find justice is to deal fairly with other people and not worry about how they deal with you.
The very idea that the Chief would let anybody expose himself to danger in his place is-well, I ought to slap your face; that's what I ought to do!
The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.
The moment I put it on, that suit became an old, familiar, and valued friend—and I became taller and wider across the shoulders. It could not have fit better if it had been made on my body. It knew th...
The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ . . . and lost track of their dutie...
The faith I was reared in didn’t require anybody to know anything. Just confess your sins and be saved, and there you were, safe in the arms of Jesus. A man could be too stupid to hit the floor with h...
The fact that he had broken his oath more times than there were years intervening did not trouble him; his was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.
The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable - from table tapping to the superiority of their own children - has never been plumbed. Faith strikes m...