Women and cats do what they do; there is nothing a man can do about it.
All right, all right, have it your own way! I can’t prove I’m right – so I must be wrong. Men!
We necessarily sift a great many pebbles, much sand, for each nugget – but the nuggets are the reward.
Functional organization. How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed – and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design. So it is with revolution.
Harshaw was working as hard as he ever worked. Most of his mind was occupied with watching pretty girls do pretty things with sun and water;.
I had never been much interested in Pluto, too few facts and too much isolation.
C’mon you apes, you wanna’ live forever?
There is no such thing as a humane war.
Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.
I am only an egg.
It’s a shock to have it proved to you that you can’t resist seducing yourself.
Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth stupid fumbling – oh, he conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid having government, any more than an individual man could escape his lifelong bondage to his bowels. But Harshaw did not have to like it. Simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it a “good.” He wished that government would wander off and get lost!
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 of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers. The title is ‘Gossip Unlimited’ – no, make that ‘Gossip Gone Wild.
Spaceships are for acrobats who are also mathematicians.
There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous... fatal, in the end.
The fact that Ben retained Cavendish shows how seriously he took the matter; you don’t hunt rabbits with an elephant gun.
You’re not privileged to call me ‘Boss’; you’re not tax deductible.
Gratitude’ is a euphemism for resentment. Resentment from most people I do not mind – but from pretty little girls it is distasteful to me.
Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale – below cost at a fat profit. We got along.
The Japanese have five different ways to say ‘thank you’ – and every one of them translates literally as resentment, in various degrees. Would that English had the same built-in honesty on this point! Instead, English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing. ‘Gratitude,’ for example.