All quotes

Am not going to argue whether a machine can "really" be alive, "really" be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am. Somewhere along…

There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.

It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong.

Everything in my life has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.

Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.

No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.

The next time I saw Li, he was wearing a uniform just like Captain Kirk's in Star Trek. "Well, what on earth," I laughed. "Don't mock, alien," Li scowled. [...] "You won't have heard," Li said, sitting beside me, "having been on EVA, but…

Come with me if you want to live.

I'll be back.

Listen and understand! That Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop ever! Until you are dead.

Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years. I can't help you with what you must soon face... except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist.

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

"Is this a chain of command, or a chain of credulity?" "There's a difference?" Miles grinned.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.

He shuddered inwardly as he thought of how the Andromedans used it. And that, he knew, was proof that he still was a man of Earth, kin to all the bias and the prejudice and the shibboleths of the human mind. For what the Andromedans had…

He wondered how important it might be that he remain, intellectually and emotionally, a citizen of Earth and a member of the human race. Tehre was, he thought, perhaps no reason that he should. With the cosmopolitanism of the galaxy at his…

For years I've tried to understand and to conform to the ethics and ideas of all the people who have come through this station. I've pushed my own human instincts and training to one side. I've tried to understand other viewpoints and to…

Throughout the Earth as well, in the early days, there had been sign languages, and none so well developed as that one which obtained among the aborigines of North America, so that an Amerindian, no matter what his tongue, could express…

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

He shut his eyes for a second and once again could see that slope below him, with the long lines of men advancing through the drifting smoke, knowing that those men were climbing up the ridge for one purpose only, to kill himself and those…

He recalled an article he had read in one of the daily papers just a day or two before in which a scientist had contended that no great intelligence ever could develop on a liquid world. But that scientist was wrong, for the Thuban race…

Enoch stood at the window and stared out across the moonlit fields that ran down to the dark line of the woods. The clouds had blown away and the night was peaceful. This particular spot, he thought, always would be peaceful, for it was…

He remembered sitting around the campfire of a night, jawing with the other fellows to pass away the time. And once he'd mentioned this idea of maybe other people on other planets circling other suns and the fellows all had jeered him and…

Once, the races were bound together. There were differences, naturally, but these differences were bridged, sometimes rather artificially and not too satisfactorily, but with both sides striving to maintain the artificial bridging and…

It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were…

There were races in the galaxy, he thought, who could reach a quick and right decision on almost any question, cutting straight across all the tangled lines of thought, guided by rules of logic that were more specific than anything the…

What is the use in not actively engaging life? It passes anyhow.

A rite of passage that doesn't involve some danger is too much a gift to create confidence.