Talking with a Martian is something like talking with an echo. You don't get any argument but you don't get results either.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
Must be yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please.
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.
Locked you in a padded cell, with a certificate signed by three doctors, and allowed you mail on alternate leap years.
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...
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... 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...