Collection

The human form is the most successful generalized form in all nature.

Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so was speech - and both are still dangerous to this day - but human beings would not be human without them

There are degrees of justice. When the lesser is incompatible with the greater, the lesser must give way.

Culture dictates invention.

Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness.

As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more.

Why should a difference in a word make any difference to the thing described?

Memory!

Always there, of course, but usually remaining hidden. And then, sometimes, as a result of just the right kind of push, it could emerge suddenly, sharply defined, all in color, bright and moving and alive.

Work out the pattern and each little event becomes inevitable.

He did worship peace; all the more because he was growing old and enjoyed his glass of wine, his atmosphere satured with mild music and perfume, his afternoon nap, and his quiet wait for death. It was how he imagined all men must feel; yet all men suffered war and destruction. They died frozen in the vacuum of space, vaporized in the blast of exploding atoms, farmished on a besieged and bombarded planet.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? So then, to end the misuse of force, only one solution was left, force itself.

Diplomacy has a language and a set of attitudes all its own. Relationships between the representatives of sovereign states, if conducted strictly according to protocol, are stylized and stultifying. The phrase "unpleasant consequences" becomes synonymous with war and "suitable adjustment" with surrender

No scientist can guarantee any theory in advance.

Every fife thousand years some inhabited planet has a fifty-fifty chance of being puffed to gas by a nova.

You see, proteins, as I probably needn't tell you, are immensely complicated groupings of amino acids and certain other specialized compounds, arranged in intricate three-dimensional patterns that are as unstable as sunbeams on a cloudy day. It is this instability that is life, since it is forever changing its position in an effort to maintain its identity--in the manner of a long rod balanced on an acrobat's nose.