"Iskilip is senile, more than half converted to his own artificial creed. He was mumbling about prophecies Val Nira made long ago, true prophecies. Bah! Tricks of memory and wishfulness."

"Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data."

"Freedom brings responsibility and often guilt. It may indeed provide a deeper satisfaction and a richer life, but the evaluation of such rewards is a distressingly subjective process. Perhaps no argument in favor of liberty can satisfy the intellect; perhaps the best we can hope for is a shared emotional conviction."

"Anderson demonstrates that if one accepts a sham mystery as real, one has stopped or strayed in the search for truth, and truth has survival value."

"Mystery is in a way the guarantee of the boundlessness of the might of the ruler: power bound to reason must always have limitations, great though it may be."

"One can surrender one’s rational will to beliefs or habits as easily as to individuals, for essentially the same reasons, and with essentially the same results. Ideas have a mystery and power of their own."

"When facts are insufficient, theorizing is ridiculous at best, misleading at worst."

"“Don’t talk, you,” he said. “It hurts my ears. Nor think; that hurts your head.’”"

"One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day."

"“You were right. We should never have created science. It brought the twilight of the race.” “I never said that. The race brought its own destruction, through misuse of science. Our culture was scientific anyway, in all except its psychological basis. It’s up to us to take that last and hardest step. If we do, the race may yet survive.”"

"No, the only way to sanity—to survival—is to abandon class prejudice and race hate altogether, and work as individuals. We’re all...well, Earthlings, and subclassification is deadly. We all have to live together, and might as well make the best of it."

"“Lord, that war was crazy!” “All wars are,” said Drummond dispassionately. “but technology advanced to the point of giving us a knife to cut our throats with. Before that, we were just beating our heads against the wall. Robinson, we can’t go back to the old ways. We’ve got to start on a new track—a track of sanity.”"

"Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness."

"A greedy man is an unlucky man."

"They tell me our kind was friendly with the old gods, and with older gods before them. Yet never have we made offering or worship. I’ve tried and failed to understand such things. Does a god need flesh or gold? Does it matter to him how you live? Does it swerve him if you grovel and whimper? Does he care whether you care about him?"

"Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, “but this is frightful!” “Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.” His eye stabbed at hers. “Would you?” “Well… No.” “Locked among bleak brick walls for all her days; shorn, harshly clad, ill-fed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither that which God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time.…” “Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.” “Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You, too—in your heart—not so?—whether or not you have said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”"

"We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?"

"Collectively as well as individually, man is never going to find perfection. Some societies he builds may work better, for the majority anyhow, than others. But all of them will have their built-in drawbacks. Their affairs will always be conducted with a high irreducible minimum of inefficiency. Read: sentimentalism, magical thinking, shortsightedness, vanity, greed, envy, hate, fear – not because we are evil but because we are mortal."

"Time is the bridge that always burns behind us."

"It was true. Men died and civilization died, but before they died they lived. It was not altogether futile."

"I was not speaking of minor ripples in the mainstream of history—certainly those are ruled by chance. But the broad current moves quite inexorably, I assure you."

"A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die."

"You know what they say about bold spacemen never becoming old spacemen."

"What, after all, what is the most logical way for superman to evolve? Not in one fantastic mutation of unknown thousands of genes all working to produce the same results: the very formulation was an insult to the laws of probability. No, homo superior should have evolved from homo sapiens in the same way that other species had evolved from a parent stock—by isolation of a few not very different mutations, selection and intensification of the new traits, new mutations gradually appearing and being lost if they were unfavorable, being incorporated if they gave some advantage."

"I ignored everybody's input and followed my inward intuition. Don't ever let a loser lead you."

"Jealousy’s vicious bulldog trampled through my soul. I was furious, no, furious is not a strong enough word; I was enraged with envy, hate, and malice toward a strange brunette kissing my boyfriend. What is that tramp doing with my man?"

"It [the frenzy of Odin] coursed through the thronged warriors; it seemed a tangible thing, communicating itself from one to another; it was almost as though one could see it, but one could not see it, only its effects. I could trace its passage. It seemed first a ghastly infection, a plague; then it seemed like a fire, invisible and consuming; then it seemed like the touching of these men by the hands of gods, but no gods I knew, none to whom a woman or child might dare pray, but the gods of men, and of the men of Torvaldsland, the dread, harsh divinities of the cruel north, the gods of Torvaldsland."

"It is generally my thesis then to insist on the importance of imagination in sex, to insist that the practice of sex, as performed among human beings, be accorded the same deliberate and playful application of fancy, imagination and intelligence as any other significant human activity."

"Smart people learn to fit into different cultures without being influenced by them."

"The word of God is God, and therefore has to be revealed to you by God. When God’s Holy Spirit reveals to you the meaning of His word, then you will recognize the truth of His word."

"The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea."

"It's always the details that get you in trouble."

"Never ask them for an explanation. You only end up worse confused."

"It's how you get rid of cats. You get a 500-pound parakeet and teach it to say, "Here, kitty kitty kitty.""

""We learned dwarves are not meant to fly." came a voice from the edge of the circle."

""What was that?" Jerry asked, peering over the edge. "I think it was a ninja dwarf." Wiz said wonderingly..."

"The law of similarity made any map a magical instrument."

"Always secure your files, you never know who is lurking about."

""The question is, is that a bug or a feature?" Karl asked."

"Programming is like pinball. The reward for doing it well is the opportunity to do it again."

"Judith looked at the demons and shook her head. "I'm glad we didn't build four processors. I'm not sure I could take a barbershop quartet!""

"He deliberately left them out of the code. After all, he rationalized, this is only version 1.0."

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."

"Murphy said, 'Constants aren't', and Murphy was apparently one of the gods of this universe."

"It is a pity the universe doesn't use a segmented architecture with a protected mode!"

"Wiz thought about what it would be like to work with a computer that killed the programmer every time it crashed and shuddered."

"What happened, get lost in the directory tree again?"

"As flat as an open can of coke, left on a programmer's desk over the weekend."