37 quotes
News is, by definition, bad news.
Millennium (1983)
This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.
The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)
But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can’t get any more ancient than that.
The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)
There was something at the core of the world of business that refused to adjust to children in the board room, while appearing to make every effort to accommodate the working mother.
I sat on the bed and read the Gideon Bible until the food came. That Gideon sure had a weird sense of humor. Try “The Book of Genesis.”
Millennium (1983)
It’s unpleasant to find that what you had thought of as moral scruples suddenly seem not quite so important in the face of a stack of money.
They had a good picture of the world as it is, not the rosy misconceptions so many other utopians labor under. They did the jobs that needed doing.
Why is it that once having decided what I must do, I'm afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe because the original decision cost me so much that I didn’t want to go through it again.
I’m decrepit, but I ain’t senile.
We’ve become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it’s time to railroad, there’s time to build a beautiful railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency.
The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)
They were testing ways whereby people didn't have to live in Chicago. It was a wonder to me. I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea.
She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming an object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live.
Equinoctial (1977)
There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness.
We speak of the rigid framework of events, but the fact is there is some leeway. Apparently things tend to happen the way they should happen, according to whatever plan was dictated by whoever’s in charge of this stinking universe. Changes, if they are minor, correct themselves in ways no one understands but which tend to make a hash of anybody’s theory of free will.
Millennium (1983)
I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptom of which is the ability to ignore it while your society develops weeping pustules and has its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots.
Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart. They’re just fast. They can be programmed to act smart, but then it’s the programmer who’s actually smart and not the computer. If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it. And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart.
Millennium (1983)
You can define heroism any way you want to, but that’s it for me. It’s sticking in there no matter what. Whether it’s a pilot fighting his plane down through that last mile, or switchboard operators and doctors and nurses staying at their posts while the bombs blitz London, or even the dance band on the Titanic playing while the ship goes down…
It’s fulfilling your responsibilities.
Millennium (1983)