It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.
I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
Having reached 451 books as of now doesn’t help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one. (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: I love you, Janet.) [They were. -Janet.]
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.
The saddest aspect of life now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.
I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.
Fifty years, I hackneyed, is a long time.Not when you’re looking back at them, she said. You wonder how they vanished so quickly.