Can a machine be so frightened and hurt that it will go into catatonia and refuse to respond? While ego crouches inside, aware but never willing to risk it? No, can’t be that; Mike was unafraid – as g...
But as a matter of strict fact, did Agnes have any maternal in her? When she set her mouth that way, it was hard to see it. Oh shucks, all women had maternal instincts; science had proved that. Well,...
Big money isn’t hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of single-minded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money, to the utter exclusion of all other interests.
Being up to something was the unnamable and unforgiveable crime for which any American male could be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in one breath. He wondered how things had gotten rigged s...
Being aware that he had but a short time to live and having neither Martian nor Kansan faith in immortality, he purposed to live each golden moment as eternity—without
Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.
As it says in the Bible, God fights on the side with the heaviest artillery.
Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . ....
Anyone who clings to the historically untrue—and thoroughly immoral—doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wel...
And you, Edward? Is there something in this world for which you’d surrender your life and your soul, if need be? You need not answer—I saw in your face and in your heart, last night, as you bent over...
All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.
Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But is the process of evoking pity or terror, which is not abstract at all but very human.
A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!
A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive—and nowhere else!—and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at eac...
A motion to adjourn is always in order.
Writing is a legal way of avoiding work without actually stealing and one that doesn't take any talent or training
Though weather is important while it happens it seems to me to be pretty dull to look back on. You can take descriptions of most any sort of weather out of an almanac and stick them in just anywhere;...
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 out to...
The government’—that’s too sweeping a term. ‘The government’ is several million people, nearly a million in Washington alone. We have to ask ourselves: Whose toes were being stepped on? What person or...
Most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers.