It is almost impossible to shake of one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that had you been brought up by Martians, you would have the same attitude toward eating and being...
Is this Paradise?''I can guarantee you that it isn't,' Jubal assured him. 'My taxes are due this week.
If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vo...
Even Lot might have been mistaken. But that’s what he promised ‘em – his virgin daughters, young and tender and scared – urged this street gang to rape them as much as they wished in any way that they...
English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing.
As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have...
. . .and he has nevergiven up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door intoSummer. You know, I think he is right.
A thing can be fine on paper but utterly crummy in the field.
For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet's censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see wh...
There used to be, dirtside, a legal defenses called diminished capacity and not guilty by reason on insanity. These concepts would bewilder a Loonie. In Luna City a man would necessarily be of diminis...
Live and learn, or you don't live long.
Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for wor...
Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequ...
All three of us are prisoners of our early indoctrinations, for it is hard, very nearly impossible, to shake off one’s earliest training.
Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective . . . and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you’ve resisted.
. . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.
Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
Marriage is a young man’s disaster and an old man’s comfort.