491 quotes
“Let me add,” he went on, “that since I handle secret and most-secret despatches, I know things that I don’t know, if I make my meaning clear.”
The Number of the Beast (1980)
“What sort of a remark?”
“Just priestly mumbo-jumbo. Impressive and no real meaning. Can you do it?”
“I think so—I used to sell magazine subscriptions.”
Sixth Column (1949)
These savages and their false gods! I grow weary of them. Yet they are necessary; the priests and the gods of slaves always fight on the side of the Masters. It is a rule of nature.
Sixth Column (1949)
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)
I believe in — I am proud to belong to — the United States.
This I Believe: Our Noble, Essential Decency (1952)
Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing —and you don't have to go home in the cold. But it's lonely.
Time Enough for Love (1973)
A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate.
Time Enough for Love (1973)
At the time I wrote Methuselah’s Children I was still politically quite naive and still had hopes that various libertarian notions could be put over by political processes…
“Uh, I find I’m astonished again. How is this place run? Is it an anarchy?”
Hazel shrugged. Justin Foote looked thoughtful. “No, I wouldn’t say so. It is not that well organized.”
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)
The more you love, the more you can love — and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just.
Time Enough for Love (1973)
It’s impossible for a woman to lay it on too thick with a man. If you tell a man he’s eight feet tall and say it often enough, with your eyes wide and a throb in your voice, he’ll start stooping to go through seven-foot doors.
I Will Fear No Evil (1970)
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)
Friday, brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value. Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving the stupid ones in place.
Friday (1982)
“Johnnie, the nice thing about citing God as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove. It’s just a matter of selecting the proper postulates, then insisting that your postulates are ‘inspired.’ Then no one can possibly prove that you are wrong.”
The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)
Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is — so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.
Glory Road (1963)
“I was just trying to show you,” he went on, “just how insubstantial a ‘common sense’ idea can be when you pin it down. Neither ‘common sense’ nor ‘logic’ can prove anything. Proof comes from experiment, or to put it another way, from experience, and from nothing else.”
Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea.
I expect this to be my last venture in this field; 'tain't worth the grief
Grumbles from the Grave (1989)
There is solemn satisfaction in doing the best you can for eight billion people. Perhaps their lives have no cosmic significance, but they have feelings. They can hurt.
Double Star (1956)
My mistake. My inexcusable mistake, as a con man never stops being a con man; he can’t. But I suffered from a will to believe, a defect of character that I thought I had rooted out. I was mistaken.
Friday (1982)