Quotes

It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable.

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!

Facts are facts! And if they're impossible, they're still facts!

I've never noticed that being nonsensical keeps things from happening. Don't you ever read about politics?

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.

On twilight: a fairy half-light in which all things looked much more charming than they really were.

Nobody is ever as happy as while he is making a fool of himself over a woman.

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.

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!

Do you realize 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?

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.

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

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

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.

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