Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
When one teaches, two learn.
If I had a Boy Scout I could make a fire by rubbing his hind legs together.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, “equality” is a disaster.
At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that ‘news’ is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different – in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness.
The Universe was a silly place at best... but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings ‘just happened’ to be atoms that ‘just happened’ to get together in ways which ‘just happened’ to look like consistent laws and some configurations ‘just happened’ to possess self-awareness and that two ‘just happened’ to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Democracy’s worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents – a depressingly low level, but what else can you expect?
Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed – to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience.
Women and cats do as they damned well please, and men and dogs had best learn to live with it.
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Prof is right; more than three people can’t decide anything.
A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive.
That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street.
Mike did not seem to grasp the idea of Creation itself. Well, Jubal wasn’t sure that he did, either – he had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days – since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other – with, of course, a day off each year for sheer solipsist debauchery.
Marriage is a young man’s disaster and an old man’s comfort.
There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary... because it hurts less to write than it does not to write.
The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable – from table tapping to the superiority of their own children – has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don’t argue with it – especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.
I had no sympathy for him and still haven’t. That old saw about “To understand all is to forgive all” is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.
To die trying is the proudest humans thing.