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

"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."

"Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times."

"Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again."

"Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure "good government, it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare - most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the "backseat driver syndrome."

"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits."

"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."

"Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance."

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

"Women and cats do what they do, there is nothing a man can do about it."

"She found as always that words on paper proved themselves, they were so beautifully true."

"How is a sincere criminal, trying hard, going to get ahead in his profession if his victim fails to cooperate?"

"Never own more than you can carry in both hands at a dead run."

"The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history."

"If you got good elective officials in your day, it was a happy accident, better than you deserved."

"Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman's breasts, it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy."

"If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship."

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

"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."

"The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up."

"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."

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

"In the twentieth century, nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America---and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it."

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

"Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil."

"As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have..."

"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."

"Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity."

"Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale--below cost at a fat profit. We got along."

"There were many, many times thereafter that Don regretted having enlisted - but so has every man who ever volunteered for military service."

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

"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."

"People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin--a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox."

"Başkalarının işine burnunu sokmamak, insanın sahip olabileceği bilgeliğin yüzde seksenidir... Kalan yüzde yirmi de pek önemli değildir zaten."

"Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys, it's more sanitary."

"Marrying Gretchen is a good idea, darling; I would enjoy bringing her up. Teaching her to shoot, helping her with her first baby, coaching her in how to handle a knife, working out with her in martial arts, all the homey domestic skills a girl needs in this modern world."

"He was finding it ruinously expensive to be rich."

"A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld."

"Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body."

"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."

"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."

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

"But how, from the viewpoint of a Martian, did man differ from other animals? Would a race that could levitate and god knows what else be impressed by engineering? If so would the Aswan Dam or a thousand miles of coral reef win first prize? Man's self awareness, sheer conceit. There was no way to prove that sperm whales and sequoias were not philosophers and poets exceeding any human merit?"

"A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future."

"I'm too much old-timer to be rude to a woman no matter what - they have so much of what we have none of."