Great Throughts Treasury

"Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun--and neither can stop the march of events."

"Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin."

"Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy"

"Don't try to have the last word. You might get it."

"Dorcas, you already reek like a Marseilles cat house; don't wheedle Mike for more stinkum."

"Dress yourself in heavy fishing waders, put on an overcoat and boxing gloves and a bucket over your head, then have somebody strap two sacks of cement across your shoulders and you will know what a space suit feels like under one gravity."

"Drop dead-but first get permit"

"Each generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of cover-up ? if any."

"Early rising is a vice... it'll stunt your growth and shorten your days."

"Elephants aren't human but they are very nice people."

"English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing."

"English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions... or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it."

"Even with Las Vegas giddy around me I felt as alone as Robinson Crusoe."

"Every general prohibition creates its bootleggers."

"Every law that was ever written opened up a new way to graft."

"Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins."

"Everybody is equal. Everybody! That's the law. They are? Only from on top."

"Everybody lies about sex."

"Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks."

"Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen."

"Everything to excess. To enjoy the flavor of life take big bites. Moderation is for monks."

"Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards."

"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness."

"Fighting continued on a token basis, and the dead did not complain."

"First they junked the concept of ?justice.? Examined semantically ?justice? has no referent?there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point, and say, ?This is justice.? Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; therefore it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any ?noises? said about it will only add to confusion. But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some particular person, they declared to be lawful."

"First you must learn to control yourself. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes."

"First, I want your solemn oath not even to talk in your sleep about this job. If my simple word is not good, is my oath better?"

"For explanations of a universe that confuses him, he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity."

"For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization."

"For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet's censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything---you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

"Forgiveness and thanks go hand in hand."

"Formal courtesy between husband and wife is even more important than it is between strangers."

"Foster had in common with every great religious leader of that planet two traits: he had an extremely magnetic personality, and sexually he did not fall near the human norm. On Earth great religious leaders were always either celibate or the antithesis. Foster was not celibate."

"Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events."

"Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite."

"Friday, don't despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool, merit or demerit lies in how it is used."

"From my point of view it is better to be alive and young again, and broke, than it is to be the richest corpse in Forest Lawn."

"From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit."

"From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, 'Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.' He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well?something in math?but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle."

"From the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the processes by which over-crowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness."

"Geniuses and super-geniuses always make their own rules about sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers."

"Geniuses are justifiably contemptuous of the opinions of their inferiors."

"Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect."

"Getting a problem analyzed is two-thirds of solving it."

"Getting up early does not get more work done... any more than you can make a piece of string longer by cutting off one end and tying it onto the other. You get less work done if you persist in getting up yawning and still tired. You aren't sharp and you make mistakes and have to do it over. That sort of busy-busy is wasteful. As well as unpleasant. And annoying to those who would sleep late if their neighbors weren't so noisily active at some ungodly cow-milking hour... progress doesn't come from early risers - progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

"Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions... and all of it graceful."

"God created men to test the souls of women."

"God forbid that I should ever be a good influence on anybody."

"God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent ? it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills."

"God made alcohol and he made feet - and he made 'em so you could put 'em together and be happy!"