If you're born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown.
Until now in world's history, whenever we've had a dark age, its been temporary and local. And other parts of the world have been doing fine. And eventually, they help you get out of the dark age. We are now facing a possible dark age which is going to be world-wide and permanent! That's not fun. That's a different thing. But once we have established many worlds, we can do whatever we want as long as we do it one world at a time.
I want to be a human being, nothing more and nothing less. ... I don't suppose we can ever stop hating each other, but why encourage that by keeping the old labels with their ready-made history of millennial hate?
Life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far superior to that of muscle and sinew.
Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows.
It is not only the living who are killed in war.
The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.
You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.
Goodbye, Hari, my love. Remember always--all you did for me.” -I did nothing for you.” -You loved me and your love made me--human.
Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.
All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses.
I do not use airplanes. They strike me as unsporting. You can have an automobile accident-and survive. You can be on a sinking ship-and survive. You can be in an earthquake, fire, volcanic eruption, tornado, what you will-and survive. But if your plane crashes, you do not survive. And I say the heck with it.
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.
We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth-if such a thing can even be said to exist.
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.
Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.
It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.
Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us.
A fire-eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.
No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.
Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.
There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.
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