The aim of intelligence is to put the whole goddamned human race out of work.

Here she was trying to teach him the Peasant Shuffle. He could not hope to master it all in a night, of course; at the Peasants’ School in Zug they had spent an entire semester on Cringing alone.

Most men lead lives of quiet aspiration.

Overhead, a Hawk was zeroing in on a watchbird. The armored murder machine had learned a lot in a few days. Its sole function was to kill. At present it was impelled toward a certain type of living organism, metallic like itself. But the Hawk had just discovered that there were other types of living organisms, too – Which had to be murdered.

I don’t finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.

All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth of falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics.

When you have a project, do it exactly as you see fit; then fit the facts around the event, not the other way around.

These two races hunted each other, lived and died for each other, and, through ignorance or guile, ignored any relationship between each other. The relationship was utterly symbiotic, but completely unacknowledged by either race. In fact, each race pretended that it alone was a Civilized Intelligence, and that the other was bestial, contemptible, and of no account. And it now occured to both of themthat they were, in equal measure, participants in the general concept of Humanity.

An error which is not perpetuated cannot be viewed as any error at all.

He shared the common human hallmark: he was simultaneously predictable and unfathomable – a routine miracle.