44 quotes
For vice has this defect; it cannot be truly intelligent. Its very motives are its weakness.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
“If you know any prayers, better say them.”
Sam shook his arm. “It’s not time to pray; it’s time to get busy.”
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
“Mooncraft isn’t a game; it’s the real thing. ‘Did you stay alive?’ If you make a mistake, you flunk—and they bury you.”
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
Aside from mathematics, just two things worth doing—kill a man and love a woman. He had done both; he was rich.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
Narby had no particular respect for engineers, largely because he had no particular talent for engineering.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
“But you were right!”
“Since when has being right endeared a man to his boss?”
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
Earth, seen from space, looked as it had looked in color-stereo pictures, but he found that the real thing is as vastly more satisfying as a hamburger is better than a picture of one.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
No, chum, there’s a lot of guff talked about freedom. No man is free. There is no such thing as freedom. There are only various privileges.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
“Why do you like to play chess so well?”
“Because it is the only thing in the world where I can see all the factors and understand all the rules.”
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
To be sure, some humans were always doing silly things—but at what point had prime damfoolishness become commonplace? When for example, had the zombie-like professional models become accepted ideals of American womanhood?
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
Men! Their minds were devious—they seemed to like twisted ways of doing things. It confirmed her opinion that men should not be allowed to vote.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
He was beginning definitely to dislike Mrs. Van Vogel, despite his automatic tendency to genuflect in the presence of a high credit rating.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
Bob Wilson admitted to himself that a Ph.D. and an appointment as an instructor was not his idea of existence. Still, it beat working for a living.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
It is very difficult to tuck a bugle call back into a bugle. Pandora’s Box is a one-way proposition. You can turn a pig into sausage, but not sausage into pig. Broken eggs stay broken.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
Apparently she believes she is safe. Evil is essentially stupid, Joe; despite her brilliance, she believes what she wishes to believe. Or it may be that she is willing to risk her own death against the tempting prize of absolute power.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
There’s one thing this has taught me: You can’t enslave a free man. Only person can do that to a man is himself. No, sir—you can’t enslave a free man. The most you can do is kill him.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
In the first place there isn’t a distinguished anthropologist in the world but what you’ll find one equally distinguished who will call him a diamond-studded liar. They can’t agree on the simplest elements of their alleged science.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
A half hour later I had a headache and a plan, but it called for an accomplice. The plan, I mean. The headache I could manage alone.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)
Free will was another matter. It could not be laughed off, because it could be directly experienced—yet his own free will had worked to create the same scene over and over again. Apparently human will must be considered as one of the factors which make up the processes in the continuum—”free” to the ego, mechanistic from the outside.
Off the Main Sequence (2005)