Anne is God. I am God. The happy grass are God, Jill groks in beauty always. Jill is God. All shaping and making and creating together.

There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in...

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

Be wary of strong drink, it can make you shoot at the tax collector…and miss.

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

Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

common sense” told them was impossible.

The way to find justice is to deal fairly with other people and not worry about how they deal with you.

Do you know your Bible?”Uh, not very well.”It merits study, it contains very practical advice for most emergencies.

I’m always suspicious of disinterested interest.

Never try to outstubborn a cat.

Civilians are like beans; you buy ’em as needed for any job which merely requires skill and savvy.But you can’t buy fighting spirit.

…I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write……writing is antisocial. It’s as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone… and not even know that he’s doing it. As writers’ wives...

His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.

Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can’t be enforced weakens all other laws.

I’ve never been able to understand ‘faith’ myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones – by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether universe or a smaller one.

In Wilson’s scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.

Customs, morals–is there a difference?

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.

He’s an honest politician–he stays bought.

Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it’s eight times as good as any other method.

God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends. This may not be true, but it sounds good—and is no sillier than any other theology.

Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly.

All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.

I told you that ‘juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms. ‘Delinquent’ means ‘failing in duty.’ But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be...

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.

Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive.

Butterflies are not insects,’ Captain John Sterling said soberly. ‘They are self-propelled flowers.

A hero must hero.

I’m so busy doing what I must do that I don’t have time for what I ought to do… and I never get a chance to do what I want to do!- Son, that’s universal. The way to keep that recipe from killing you is occasionally to do what you want to do anyhow.

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

The golden sunshine of Italy congealed into tears. Here’s to alcoholic brotherhood … much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort.

The great trouble with religion – any religion – is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both.

The Universe was a damned silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for its existence was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that some abstract somethings “just happened” to be some atoms that “just happened” to get together in configurations which “just happened” to look like consistent laws and...

Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?–TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.Poor arithmetic, but very human....

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.

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

The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. . . . A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the...

Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.So I...

The country and culture commonly known as “America” had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees—its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.

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 ....

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Death isn’t funny.” “Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.

Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.

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