All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary.
Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer.
At odd and unpredictable times, we cling in fright to the past.
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
Dreams may be impossible, yet still be dreamed.
Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.
He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means 'I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve.' It's easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.
(on Robert A. Heinlein and libertarian ethics).
(on Robert A. Heinlein and libertarian ethics).
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just an infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.
I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.
I figure that if God actually does exist, he is big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion.
I tell you that I could despair of human intelligence when I see what can exist in men's minds.
I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
If the doctor told me I had only six months to live, I'd type faster.
Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.
Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.
It is a mistake... to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people... If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with.
It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
It's one thing to have guts; it's another to be crazy.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.
My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job that he isn't worth discussing.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
No vision of God and heaven ever experienced by the most exalted prophet can, in my opinion, match the vision of the universe as seen by Newton or Einstein.
Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put an orgy in my room and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.
Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
Past glories are poor feeding.
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.
People think of education as something they can finish.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say 'Heil Hitler.'
Properly read, it (the Bible) is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Science is a set of rules to keep us from telling lies to each other. All scientists really have is a reputation for telling the truth.
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.
Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.
The Bible contains legendary, historical, and ethical contents. It is quite possible to consider them separately, and one doesn't have to accept the legends in order to get the ethics. Fundamentalists make a grave mistake to insist on the letter of the writings, because they drive away many who can't swallow the Adam-and-Eve bit.
The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie.
The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.
The great secret of the successful fool is that he's no fool at all.
The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.
The intelligent man is never bored.
The Law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
The significant chemicals of living tissue are rickety and unstable, which is exactly what is needed for life.
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.
There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.
There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.
There's something about a pious man... He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul.
Thin people are thin because they don't know any better.
To insult someone we call him 'bestial.' For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
We are reaching the stage where the problems we must solve are going to become insoluble without computers. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like 'America's right to know' and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshiping it, just to find hope again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation. Yes, atheism is a redemptive belief. It is theism that denies man's own redemptive nature.
When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.
Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless.
You can't reason with someone whose first line of argument is that reason doesn't count.
Found 75 occurence(s) in 52,075 quotation(s).
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