To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

A lot of science fiction is science-based, and it comes about because people notice something interesting about science and work it into a story.

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

The Law of the Sea Treaty created a supranational organization to regulate what is done with and under the international seabeds.

When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas.

Your book catches on like any other new product and once it does you are there and how you behave when you get there is up to you.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

Many people think my movies come out of the deepest feelings of bitterness and cynicism and hostility and not out of any positive feelings at all.

A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.

Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen.

I guess you could say I’ve been writing all my life.

It’s often been said that I’m an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I’ve never known what to make of that.

The supply of money in a single country was subject to no centralized, responsible control in most countries over recent centuries.

Personally, I can’t see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.

There’s some pictures of me playing hollow bodies, but I never last long. I always come back to the acoustic.

Greenspan tells us what to do. Someone should take him out and hang him.

Reversing your treatment of the man you have wronged is better than asking his forgiveness.

It’s clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

Empires won by conquest have always fallen either by revolt within or by defeat by a rival.

The presidency is not an entry-level electoral job.

When I work I am pure as an angel tiger and clear is my eye and hot my brain and silent all the whining grunting piglets of the appetites.

I am very proud of this work because it is more about the meaning of the Easter Rising and its relationship to what this whole century has been about, people liberating themselves, freeing themselves.

The minute you make people laugh, you get them to listen.

The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.

To be honest, I am often unsettled by the responses some people have had to my movies, and that includes many people who like them.

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I’ll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She’ll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get...

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn’t even know how to aim the camera in those days.

I think the biggest thing that we are going to be able to do is focus on training, practicing, working on my starts, and taking each race one at a time.

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

All I do is go to the movies.

Hope is tomorrow’s veneer over today’s disappointment.

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

There is a method which distinguishes SF from fantasy, though a lot of the science fiction written does not go by that method, and some fantasy does.

God and the politicians willing, the United States can declare peace upon the world, and win it.

Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.

I don’t think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets...

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.

My guiding thought throughout was that the real Marine story had not been told. We were a different breed of men who looked at war in a different way.

Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.

But anonymity is very important to me, and I don’t want to be recognized in public more than I already am.

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother’s love endures through all.

The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.

I think a lot of the difference between my newer work and the older work is that I would have tried to imply some of those things before.

Instead, there were a variety of controls of which some could be influenced by bankers, some could be influenced by the government, and some could hardly be influenced by either.

That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.

There’s been a big buzz about the Charlatans in the last couple of years. I’ve heard the word Charlatans more in the last few years than I’d heard it for the previous 20 years. People...