"And there you had it. Most people hate to learn that they are wrong. Not McAndrew. When he’s proved wrong, he’s ecstatic. It means he’s learned something new, and that’s his main reason for existence."

"We got the way we are, Jeanie, because life on Earth is one long fight for limited resources. Our bloody-mindedness all started out as food battles, three billion years ago."

"One thing you have to teach the young is that it’s wrong to run away from problems."

"The more foolproof you think something is, the worse the failure when it happens."

"“Captain Roker, I don’t like your insinuation,” he said. “McAndrew is a physicist—so am I. You may not be smart enough to realize it, but physics is a field of study, not a surgical operation. Castration isn’t part of the Ph.D. Exams, you know.”"

"The possible future is not just longer than the past. It is unimaginably longer."

"Unfair to other students? Probably. I was not going to worry about that. Show me a totally impartial teacher, and I’ll show you a robot."

"As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses worked harder than anyone else, not less hard."

"But maybe we wrongly define the higher human functions. How we think and feel about everything except questions of pure logic is decided maybe five percent in our brains, ninety-five percent in our glands. And how many events in human history have been the result of logical thought? Just try to name one."

"“Any great thoughts?”… “The younger generation are clearly unfitted to run the world, but one day they are going to do it anyway.”"

"I sometimes think that the only thing in life that I find truly irresistible is the challenge to finagle something that everyone else says can’t be done."

"The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go."

"Like many things in life, the problem I had been so sure I could solve proved more difficult than it sounded."

"It is very clear that nothing in nature presents such a danger to the human race is our own actions."

"Is that what it takes to go all the way in politics? Ambition first, everything else back in the pack? And if it is, would any sane human want to have what it takes?"

"If deadly violence were to be committed, he was like me. He would think it better to give than to receive."

"Humans harnessed a negligible fraction of tidal energy, although the available energy is huge. Other species do rather better, and the intertidal zones are the most biologically productive regions of the world, more so than even the tropical rainforests."

"“Could it wipe out life on Earth?” “Oh, I very much doubt that. Single-celled and oceanic forms will presumably survive. But it might make life impossible for humans.” “Actually, that tends to be my primary concern. Sponges and oysters will have to take care of themselves.”"

"More and more, she felt certain that the members of the Legion of Argos from the top down were mental cases. Prophecies, penances, holy cleansings, arbitrary murders to settle grievances, ethnic entry requirements, guns everywhere, regimented behavior, visitors who were effectively prisoners—all the signs of a paramilitary religious cult."

"Everyone agreed what an interesting concept it was—the sort of thing that ought to be true, in an interesting world."

"The leaders of the Legion of Argos were out-of-this-world mad. Rigid in outlook, intolerant of minor differences. In other centuries they would have led the Inquisition, tortured the heretics, burned the witches."

"They saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia."

"Luck is infatuated with the efficient."

"Intelligence is too subtle an attribute to be inferred from appearance."

"I worry when I hear talk of “this many millions” and “that many billions” from officials who I know have trouble calculating a restaurant tip."

"Richard Nixon was protected from impeachment, so long as Spiro Agnew was Vice President and would assume the presidency in Nixon’s place. Half of Washington knew that Agnew was a crook, and a boneheaded one at that. They had to get rid of Agnew before they could really go after Nixon."

"Right decision or wrong decision, it was a leader’s job to make it."

"The important question wasn’t whether or not you thought you were the right one to lead. It was whether others believed you were."

"There was one good argument against cloning, and only one. It increased the total number of people, and to me that number already felt far too large."

"You pursue progress, even if you suspect that it is an illusion."

"Everyone was somebody’s cousin, or uncle, or bedmate, or best college friend. Sometimes he felt that the whole of Washington was glued together into one vast, incestuous, and inefficient snotball."

"The superior strain of peas is the one whose genetic composition allows it to adapt to whatever environment it is presented with. People are not peas, but in one respect they are not very different from them: some have superior genetic composition to others."

"It is one of the unfortunate aspects of the legal profession that excess carries no penalty. There is never, for a lawyer, such a thing as too much."

"It was the age-old conundrum: How do I know that the ‘me’ who wakes after a night’s sleep is the same ‘me’ who went to bed? I don’t. I merely employ it as a working assumption, for lack of anything better."

"The heirs, naturally, wanted everything to be theirs as soon as possible. No one is more rapacious, ruthless, and impatient than a loving family member."

"“He was acquitted; he must have been.” “Right. Good lawyer, tainted evidence. But that doesn’t mean he was innocent.”"

"Trouble comes in a thousand different ways. Not usually anything you expect, either. That’s why it’s trouble."

"War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer."

"At stake with something more important than sex. At stake was life and death."

"“We’re all here,” said Louis Nenda’s voice. “Where’s here? Can you see?” “Not a thing. Black as a politician’s heart.”"

"We both know that actions taken from internal conviction are far better motivated than any external commands."

"The same thing happens to every President. People tell a chief executive what they think he wants to hear. Rosy economic reports, high popularity figures, promising international changes, you name it. There’s a competition to be the first with good news. Anyone who tells bad news tends to get weeded out—even if all the real news is bad."

"Not one word of what I’d said had got through to him. It didn’t much matter, I’d really been speaking for the media anyway, but it was a shame to see bigotry masquerading as public-spirited behavior."

"As the poet laureate of all confidence tricksters and treasure-seekers puts it, we were “given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie.”"

"He was a professional trouble-shooter. That was a fancy name for an idiot."

"Nothing in life produce a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death."

"Life’s not chess, and life’s not poker, but there’s some of both in it."

"“I think I’ll have a sign made for that far wall,” said Bey at last. “Indeed?” “Yes. It will say, ‘If you have nothing to do, please don’t do it here’.”"

"The ship climbed steadily and laboriously up, away from the plane of the ecliptic. Finally, the parallax was sufficient to move the planets from their usual apparent positions. Mars, Earth, Venus, and Jupiter all sat in constellations that were no part of the familiar zodiac. Mercury was cowering close to the sun. Saturn alone, swinging out at the far end of her orbit, seemed right as seen from the ship. Bey Wolf, picking out their positions through a viewport, wondered idly how the astrologers would cope with such a situation. Mars seemed to be in the House of Andromeda, and Venus in the House of Cygnus. It would take an unusually talented practitioner to interpret those relationships and cast a horoscope for the success of this enterprise."

"The lead prosecutor told the jury at my trial that I was “A sick parasite, preying on society.” Parasite on society; this, mind you, from a lawyer."