All quotes

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS — EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

Now the long wait was ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax. Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been…

The black rectangular slab that suddenly appeared before him was like an old friend. He had seen it on the Moon; he had encountered it in orbit around Jupiter; and he knew, somehow, that his ancestors had met it long ago. Though it held…

He was no longer radiating wastefully, but had almost mastered his control of energy, as once he had mastered lost though not forgotten limbs. He sank like a mist into the earthquake-proof vaults, until he found himself among billions of…

If he wished, he could focus his attention upon any one of its hundred billion stars. *Here* he was, adrift in this great river of suns, halfway between the banked fires of the galactic core and the lonely, scattered sentinel stars of the…

But that would never happen. If the heat shield failed, the ship would crumple instantly, hammered flat by a solid wall of gas. There would be no pain; his nervous system would not have time to react before it ceased to exist. He had…

"One minute to ignition." His mind flashed back to the here and now. This was the minute that counted; for almost a hundred years, on launch pads and in control centers, this was the longest sixty seconds that had ever existed. Countless…

He had almost reached the center of the planet, but Jupiter had one more surprise in store. The thick shell of metallic yet still fluid hydrogen ended abruptly. At last, there was a solid surface, sixty thousand kilometers down. For ages…

A whole new chapter of evolution, as alien as that which he had glimpsed on Europa, was opening before him. There were jet-propelled torpedoes like the squids of the terrestrial oceans, hunting and devouring the huge gasbags. But the…

But to Vasili, for a moment that would be imprinted on his memory forever, that sharp-edged outline held a completely different, and wholly impossible, scene. It was as if a window had suddenly been opened onto another universe. The vision…

From a distance, one's adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one's own.

Speak up, destiny, speak up! Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it's not decades away; it's right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe.

"How can such a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?" "Perhaps," said Apollo, "by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else."

"...That contraption — listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn't believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying soul. Can the principle of a ?thinking machine' — man-made — be a rational soul? Blah! It seemed a…

Adversity does teach who your real friends are

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity.

As for happiness... I don't think you can give that to anyone, if they don't have it in them. However, it's certainly possible to give un-happiness.

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

Any community's arm of force?military, police, security?needs people in it who can do the necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary, and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into…

My home is not a place, it is people.

Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win.

The most insidious lie is the one you want to hear.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

That is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

A man can smile and smile and be a villain.

We should grant power over affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase the reluctance.