The Infinite Library

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

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

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”

“It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.”

“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.”

“Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none.”

“There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.”

“Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.”

“Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.”

“To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.”

“Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.”

“Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.”

“A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”

“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.”

“Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.”

“The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.”

“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.”

“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.”

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

“May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.”

“Women talk when they want to. Or don't.”

“By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.”

“The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.”

“Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”

“The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.”

“The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.”

“The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.”

“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”

“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”

“That God is in truth the sort of bloodthirsty paranoid Who would rend to bits forty-two children for the crime of sassing one of his priests. Don't ask me about the Front Office's policies; I just work here.”

“One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.”

“I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes.”

“I never learned from a man who agreed with me.”

“No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain.”

“I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

“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 is theoretically impossible, until it is done.”

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

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.”

“Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.”

“Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.”

“Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.”

“A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.”

“They didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.”

“Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”

“One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word.”

“Never insult anyone by accident.”