Inventors

"But it might not be true enough. It might be less than...well...sufficiently true in a particular instance."

"It is the custom of all men, everywhere, to be obtuse where women are concerned."

"He needed some rather extensive changes in the relationship of the cosmos to himself."

"Most men develop convictions about the cosmos and such beliefs come in two varieties. One kind is a conviction that the cosmos does not make sense. That it exists by chance and changes by chance and human beings do not matter. This view produces a fine complacency. The other kind is a belief that the cosmos does make sense, and was designed with the idea that people were going to live in it, and that what they do and what happens to them is important. This theory seems to be depressing."

"Hoddan felt the anger any man feels when he sees betrayal of that honor a competent machine represents."

"The hearts of the rich are hardened. The existence of the poor is a reproach to them."

"He’d gone to Walden in the hope of achievement. There, of course, he failed because in a free economy industrialists consider that freedom is the privilege to be stupid without penalty. In other than free economies, of course, stupidity is held to be the duty of administrators. But Hoddan now believed himself in the fascinating situation of having knowledge and abilities which were needed by people who knew their need."

"This was the second time in his life he’d been on a horse. It was two too many."

"“You are wonderful!” she said with conviction. “I used to cherish that illusion myself,” said Hoddan."

"It couldn’t happen! Hoddan couldn’t conceive of such a thing. But a recently developed pessimism suggested that since everything else, to date, had been to his disadvantage, this was probably a catastrophe also."

"Hoddan angrily suspected fate and chance of plain conspiracy against him."

"Again time passed. In one of the remoter galaxies a supernova flamed, and on a rocky, barren world a small living thing squirmed experimentally—and to mankind the one event was just as important as the other."

"He irritably suspected himself of a tendency to make enemies unnecessarily."

"“You’ve got to do something!” insisted Fani. “I saw Father talking to them! He looked happy, and he never looks happy unless he’s planning some skulduggery!”"

"“It’s no use!” it was the custom of his grandfather to say. “There’s not a bit o’ use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A lucky idiot’s ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him! A smart man starts thinkin’, and he thinks himself into a jail cell if his luck is bad, and good luck’s wasted on him because it ain’t reasonable and he don’t believe in it when it happens! It’s taken me a lifetime to keep my brains from ruinin’ me! No, sir! I hope none o’ my descendants inherit my brains! I pity ‘em if they do!” Hoddan had been on Darth not more than four hours. In that time he’d found himself robbed, had resented it, had been the object of two spirited attempts at assassination, had ridden an excruciating number of miles on an unfamiliar animal, and now found himself in a stone dungeon and deprived of food lest feeding him obligate his host not to cut his throat. And he’d gotten into this by himself! He’d chosen it! He’d practically asked for it! He began strongly to share his grandfather’s disillusioned view of brains."

"“Do you realize,” he asked, “that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its Golden Age? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the Good Old Days?” “I hadn’t thought of it in just those words, sir—” “It is one of the most-avoided facts of life,” said the ambassador. “Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable."

"He signed himself prince of this, lord of that, baron of the other thing and claimant to the dukedom of something else."

"A practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a noble sacrifice of personal inclinations to the welfare of the community."

"There was a beautiful row. You’ve really scared people, Hoddan! You deserve well of the republic! Every government and every person needs to be thoroughly terrified occasionally. It limbers up the brain."

"When in the course of human events somebody does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend people, changes which require them to think are most disliked."

"There is never a rational reason for a man to rejoice that a certain pretty girl exists and that he has found her. The experience, however, is universal."

"There are some people so stupid you have to show them everything. I didn’t realize that there are people so stupid you can’t show them anything."

"From the Near Rim to the farthest of occupied systems, planets circled their suns, and men lived on them, and every man took himself seriously and did not quite believe that the universe had existed before he was born or would long survive his loss."

"Lon frowned. “They’re so far ahead of us,” he said uneasily, “that they could conquer us if they wanted to. And that’s bad!” “Lon!” said the older man severely. “They’re civilized! Civilized men don’t want to conquer other men!”"

"The secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels."

"He’d caused the First Native War on Mars, by taking advantage of the fact that at that time human law had not defined the killing of Martians as murder."

"The unfamiliar is not necessarily unreasonable."

"Her eyes upon him were soft. Civilized people act upon intellectualized motives. They decide what is wise, and sometimes do it. But when they are swayed by purest primitive instincts they are usually happier. Hana was responding to one of the most ancient of all known human impulses—admiration of a proved warrior."

"And, just as she had responded to primitive prowess, so Ron reacted to feminine admiration by an enormously increased urge to accomplish."

"Lane understood. Burke was one of that considerable part of humanity which enthusiastically believes in anything that’s sufficiently dramatic."

"“Put dispassionately,” said Haynes cheerfully, “you sound like you’re crazy. But you’re stating facts. Okay so far.”"

"My specialty is the mechanics of research. But I test my theories about how to make discoveries by using them to make discoveries."

"“I’ve got an impossible job on my hands,” he told them, “and if I succeed at it, there’s an inconceivable one to follow.”"

"My purpose is not to make profits, but to keep people from being killed. Quaint, eh? But I’m one of the people I don’t want killed."

"Herb doctor is the polite term used by witch doctors when they advertise their services in newspapers. It is commonly believed that they can relieve all situations not caused by a judge or a grand jury."

"Logics don’t work good on women. Only on things that make sense."

"And this was no observation by a mere human, who might delude himself. This was a report from complex electronic devices. It was images formed on phosphors coated on radar screen tubes, excited by accelerated electrons whose pattern of impact was governed by echoes from the original of the image. Phosphors do not imagine. Electrons are not affected by panic. As a radar image it was a faithful report—in its own terms, without interpretation—of something that actually was."

"It isn’t illegal to buy an artist’s work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!"

"The most absurd of all their delusions commonly called the , or to speak more accurately, the inexhaustible source of power—is, in various forms, the subject of several patents in each year."

"The ill-success of the projects of misdirected ingenuity has very naturally the effect of driving those men of practical skill, who, though without scientific knowledge, possess prudence and common sense, to the opposite extreme of caution, and of inducing them to avoid all experiments, and to confine themselves to the careful copying of successful existing structures and machines; a course which, although it avoids risk, would, if generally followed, stop the progress of all improvement. A similar course has sometimes... been adopted by men possessed of scientific as well as practical skill: such men having, in certain cases, from deference to popular prejudice, or from a dread of being reputed us theorists, considered it advisable to adopt the worse and customary design for a work in preference to a better but unusual design."

"Some of the evils which are caused by the fallacy of an incompatibility between theory and practice having been described, it must now be admitted, that at the present time those evils show a decided tendency to decline. The extent of intercourse, and of mutual assistance, between men of science and men of practice, the practical knowledge of scientific men, and the scientific knowledge of practical men, have been for some time steadily increasing; and that combination and harmony of theoretical and practical knowledge—that skill in the application of scientific principles to practical purposes, which in former times was confined to a few remarkable individuals, now tends to become more generally diffused."

"Another evil, and one of the worst which arises from the separation of theoretical and practical knowledge, is the fact that a large number of persons, possessed of an inventive turn of mind and of considerable skill in the manual operations of practical mechanics, are destitute of that knowledge of scientific principles which is requisite to prevent their being misled by their own ingenuity. Such men too often spend their money, waste their lives, and it may be lose their reason in the vain pursuits of visionary inventions, of which a moderate amount of theoretical knowledge would be sufficient to demonstrate the fallacy ; and for want of such knowledge, many a man who might have been a useful and happy member of society, becomes a being than whom it would be hard to find anything more miserable. The number of those unhappy persons — to judge from the patent-lists, and from some of the mechanical journals — must be much greater than is generally believed."

"[O]f that scientifically practical skill which produces the greatest effect with the least possible expenditure of material and work, the instances are comparatively rare. In too many cases we see the strength and the stability which ought to be given by the skilful arrangement of the parts of a structure supplied by means of clumsy massiveness, and of lavish expenditure of material, labour, and money; and the evil is increased by a perversion of the public taste, which causes works to be admired, not in proportion to their fitness for their purposes, or to the skill evinced in attaining that fitness, but in proportion to their size and cost."

"With respect to those works which, from unscientific design, give way during or immediately after their erection, I shall say little; for with all their evils, they add to our experimental knowledge, and convey a lesson, though a costly one."

"Mechanical knowledge may... be distinguished into three kinds; purely scientific knowledge, purely practical knowledge, and that intermediate kind of knowledge which relates to the application of scientific principles to practical purposes, and which arises from understanding the harmony of theory and practice."

"But a class of structures fraught with much greater evils exist in great abundance throughout the country—namely, those in which the faults of an unscientific design have been so far counteracted by massive strength, good materials, and careful workmanship, that a temporary stability has been produced, but which contain within themselves sources of weakness, obvious to a scientific examination... that must inevitably cause their destruction within a limited number of years."

"An essential distinction exists between two stages in the process of advancing our knowledge of the laws of physical phenomena; the first stage consists in observing the relations of phenomena, whether of such as occur in the ordinary course of nature, or of such as are artificially produced in experimental investigations, and in expressing the relations so observed by propositions called formal laws. The second stage consists in reducing the formal laws of an entire class of phenomena to the form of a science; that is to say, in discovering the most simple system of principles, from which all the formal laws of the class of phenomena can be deduced as consequences."

"A physical theory, like an abstract science, consists of definitions and axioms as first principles, and of propositions, their consequences; but with these differences:—first, That in an abstract science, a definition assigns a name to a class of notions derived originally from observation, but not necessarily corresponding to any existing objects of real phenomena, and an axiom states a mutual relation amongst such notions, or the names denoting them; while in a physical science, a definition states properties common to a class of existing objects, or real phenomena, and a physical axiom states a general law as to the relations of phenomena; and, secondly,—That in an abstract science, the propositions first discovered are the most simple; whilst in a physical theory, the propositions first discovered are in general numerous and complex, being formal laws, the immediate results of observation and experiment, from which the definitions and axioms are subsequently arrived at by a process of reasoning differing from that whereby one proposition is deduced from another in an abstract science, partly in being more complex and difficult, and partly in being to a certain extent tentative, that is to say, involving the trial of conjectural principles, and their acceptance or rejection according as their consequences are found to agree or disagree with the formal laws deduced immediately from observation and experiment."

"A hypothetical theory is necessary, as a preliminary step, to reduce the expression of the phenomena to simplicity and order before it is possible to make any progress in framing an abstractive theory."

"This law (regarding the theoretical efficiency of heat engines by Mr. Joule), and the law of the maximum efficiency of heat engines, are particular cases of a general law which regulates all transformation of energy, and is the basis of the Science of Energetics."