That we were slaves I had known all my life--and nothing could be done about it. True, we weren't bought and sold--but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sel...
That old saw about To understand all is to forgive all is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them. My
Strictly speaking, the Patrol is not a military organization at all. Sir? I know, I know—you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but...
Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility—we require each person who wishes to exert control over the s...
She might get high enough to crash—no higher.
She hesitated slightly. I’ve seen what was called telekinesis with dice—but I’m no mathematician and I could not testify that what I saw was telekinesis. Hell’s bells, you wouldn’t testify that the su...
See here, son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it’s sweepstakes odds that the county commissioners didn’t order it, didn’t know it, and wouldn’t have permitted it had they known. At wor...
Remind me, Jubal said to her, to write a popular article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit...
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
Once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind.
Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one.
Men on the surface of a planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity...
Maybe the whole world held together only when you kept your attention centered on it and believed in it. If you let discrepancies creep in, you began to doubt and it began to go to pieces.
Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability against all competition...The Universe will let us know-later-whether Man has any right to expand through it.
Let me speak first of the matters I observed as a critic. Your world has several pleasures. There is eating. He reached out and pulled off from its bunch a muscat grape, fat and sugar-sweet, and ate i...
Jubal had long ago even foresworn pets, because he outlived them, or (worse yet) it was now possible that a pet would outlive him, be orphaned.
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.
I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much . . . because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting. Jill
I’m a professional bad example. You can learn a lot by watching me. Or listening to me. Either one.
It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn...