One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.
Why this reluctance to make the change? We fear the process of reeducation.
I don’t like anything that’s got to be. I want to know why.
Self-education is a continuing source of pleasure to me, for the more I know, the fuller my life is and the better I appreciate my own existence.
Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
In theory, there is nothing the computer can do that the human mind can not do. The computer merely takes a finite amount of data and performs a finite number of operations upon them. The human mind can duplicate the process.
I even got a letter from a young woman in British Columbia that began as follows: ‘Today I am eighteen. I am sitting at the window, looking out at the rain, and thinking how much I love you.’
The important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap opera; not the income tax, but the expense account; not the Bomb, but the nuclear stalemate.
The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.
We all know we fall. Newton’s discovery was that the moon falls, too-and by the same rule that we do.
There is no one so insufferable as a person who gives no other excuse for a peculiar action than saying he had been directed to it in a dream.
The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.
Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests.
I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing – I went into politics. It’s practically the same thing.
Saying something is ‘too bad’ is easy. You say you disapprove, which makes you a nice person, and then you can go about your business and not be interested anymore. It’s a lot worse than ‘too bad.’ It’s against everything decent and natural.
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.
All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end.
Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to a long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line – even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.
The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity.
Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.