"What is life anyway? - some kind of seed floating about the universe until it finds suitable conditions to develop? May be. Lord knows what there may be in all this Space. Perhaps we were once a few chance spores; perhaps there are a lot of different kinds of life floating about waiting for time to give them their chance . . ."

"The creatures fling the most dangerous frequencies around, not only without effort but regardless of consequences."

"A mind oppressed by a sense of sin can play a lot of nasty tricks. Nowadays they talk of guilt complexes and inhibitions. Names change: when I was a boy the same thing was known as a bad conscience . . ."

"Those are the methods of Earth; that is the honour of great companies, as you will know to your cost should you have dealings with them. They'll use you, and then break you. . . ."

""And it all comes of this gallivanting about the Universe. I never did think much of it. Stick to your own planet, is what I say; it's quite big enough. But will they? Not so's you'd notice it. They go flinging themselves into space, and then what happens?" He paused aggrievedly."

"We have been but little molested, for we have not the things which most men value."

"There are some forms of knowledge which it is unwise to spread; men are not yet ready to handle them."

"It was curious that, in facing the man, I felt none of the distaste one has for an abnormality."

"What did I tell you?" said my neighbour excitedly. "Force of mind, that's what those people use; that's why their hands are vestigial. Pure will-power." The dwarf seemed to hear him, for he looked towards us. "I am surprised," he sneered, "that you even know of such a thing as will-power. I judged by your reflexes that you had only instincts."

"Truth is not altered by belief or disbelief."

"Doubtless the first arrow did not kill a lion."

"The English," [Vinski] remarked at length, "have a saying that possession is nine points of the law. It is just the kind of sentiment one would expect to find in a capitalist country."

"Many men on earth have the vanity to believe in another life."

"The fact that we don't know how to do it doesn't prove its impossibility."

"A man's the same as the rest of us or 'e's a freak. Stands to reason."

"She showed all that maternal solicitude which so oddly hopes that its child will be outstanding while being absolutely normal, distinguished while being indistinguishable."

"But it is the old story of new generations refusing to be bound by the promises of their forefathers."

"There's plenty o' chaps full of book learnin' an' unemployed with it."

"To take an illustration—a bad one, I admit, but enough for our purpose—one may consider time as a river. You may turn boats adrift on it at many points, and they will all collect together at the same serious obstacle, whether they have travelled a hundred miles or two miles."

"It boils down to this. If a man, any man, claims to have had an experience which is outside all normal experience, it will be inferred, will it not, that he is in some way not quite a normal man? A small cloud, a mere wrack, of doubt and risk begins to gather above him. It is tenuous, too insubstantial for him to disperse, yet it casts a faint, persistent shadow. There is, I imagine, no such thing as a normal human being, but there is a widespread feeling that there ought to be. Any organisation has a conception of 'the type of man we want here' which is regarded as the normal for its purposes. So every man there attempts more or less to accord to it - organisational man, in fact - and anyone who diverges more than slightly from the type in either his public, or in his private life does so to the peril of his career."

"What is the use of life?"

"It is a funny thing that for most men the whitest conscience is no protection from some apprehension in the presence of the police."

"It takes civilised people quite a while to appreciate 'the big lie' technique."

"No one but a fool would say that a man who seethes inside like a volcano is calm. I only know that when I see a man so tormented and cheated, and with such a look in his eyes, he is dangerous."

""But if they change me shape, and change me voice, and change me hair and change me face, as they say, what is it that is me, at all?" asked Peggy."

"Ever seen an old man just sitting in the sun, taking it easy? It doesn't have to mean he's senile. It may do, but very likely he can snap out of it and put his mind to work again if it gets really necessary. But mostly he finds it not worth the bother. Less trouble just to let things happen.'"

"'In the end, defeat, and the cold, must come. First to the system, then the galaxy, then the universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a foolish vanity.' She paused. 'Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely - not because one wishes them to live for ever.'"

"Keeping to an unnecessary programme requires resolution."

"'Thank you, Hester,' Janet said, as she leaned back against the cushion placed behind her. Not that it was necessary to thank a robot, but she had a theory that if you did not practise politeness with robots you soon forgot it with other people."

"'Do you never work? Does nobody work?' I asked Clytassamine. 'Oh yes - if he wants to,' she said. 'But what about the unpleasant things - the things that must be done?' 'What things?' she asked, puzzled. 'Well, growing food, providing power, disposing of waste, all that kind of thing.' She looked surprised. 'Why, naturally, the machines do all that. You wouldn't expect men to do those things. Good heavens, what have we got brains for?" 'But who looks after the machines - keeps them in order?' 'Themselves, of course.'"

"'But how can you stand it - just going on and on?' It is not easy sometimes - and some of us do give up, but that is a crime, because there is always chance. And it's not quite so monotonous as you think. Each transfer makes a difference. You feel as if the world had become a different place then. The spirit rises in you like sap in spring. . . . And those glands you think so much of are not entirely without effect, because you are never quite the same person with quite the same tastes. Even in one body tastes can change quite a lot in one lifetime, and they inevitably differ slightly between bodies. But you are the same person, you have your memory, yet you are young again, you're hopeful, the world looks brighter, you think you'll be wiser this time. . . . And then you fall in love again, just as sweetly and foolishly as before. It's wonderful - like a re-birth. You can only know just how wonderful if you have been fifty and then become twenty.' 'I can guess,' I said."

"'Ingenious you certainly were - like monkeys. But you neglected your philosophers - to your own ruin. Each new discovery was a toy. You never considered its true worth. You just pushed it into your system - a system already suffering from hardening of the arteries. And you were a greedy people. You took each discovery as if it were a bright new garment, but when you put it on you wore it over your old, verminous rags. You had grave need of disinfectants.'"

"I had only my thoughts to occupy me, and they were not good company."

"No discovery is good or evil until men make it that way."

"In the profession of wifehood the exams begin at the church door—and there is never a final degree."

"Hobbies are convenient in the child, but irritant in the adult; which is why women are careful never to have them, but simply to be interested in this and that."

"I suppose one could scarcely have had innocence and experience. Being young is very exhausting and unsatisfactory, really—although it looks so nice."

"'In spite of what they say, two can't live as cheap as one. And wives hanker after certain standards, and ought to have them - within reason, of course.'"

"Other things than to fight, there is, even for dragons."

"It is what has happened, and is happening now, that determines the future. Therefore, there must be a great number of possible futures, each a possible consequence of what is being done now."

"And there was another thing, too. No matter what your business is, some gals ain't got no standard of affection except how much you neglect it for 'em. Seems they just got to back themselves against it—and they got it all nicely fixed so they win both ways. If you don't neglect it, you ain't lovin' them enough; if you do, they reckoned you were that kind of sap, anyway."

"Was she a bit mad?" "Mad? Oh, no - unless you would call a failure to grow up a kind of madness - in which case there would be very few sane people."

"Dying," observed the doctor, "is such a very ordinary thing to do."

"Sooner or later the amateur always overreaches himself."

"It was so absurd to die at sixty, anyway, and, as he saw it, it would be even more wasteful to die at eighty. A scheme of things in which the wisdom acquired in living was simply scrapped in this way was, to say the least, grossly inefficient. What did it mean? That somebody else would have to go through the process of learning all that life had already taken sixty years to teach him; and then be similarly scrapped in the end. No wonder the race was slow in getting anywhere—if, indeed, it were getting anywhere—with this cat-and-mouse, ten-forward-and-nine-back system."

"There is a sense of reason's fingernails scrabbling to keep their hold, as one slides towards something which is not accountable; not, by ordinary standards, quite sane..."

"I see death as the worm's opportunity. It is defeat. You can dress it as you like, with drama, or glory, or pomposity, and perhaps deceive yourself for the critical moment - but, nevertheless, the same worm comes - it is defeat..."

"I suppose we all have a number of carefully furnished, non-communicating rooms in our minds."

"I'd begun to grasp the principle that the less anybody knows, the less any squealer can give away. And it was easy to see that in a place where questioning was liable to assume the aspect of a blood-sport, the less one did know about other people's business, the better."

"There's a type of woman who isn't content until she's made herself some man's slave and doormat—put herself completely in his power."