A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?

The single definition of government I've ever seen that makes sense is that it's the organization which claims the right to kill people who won't do what it wants.

A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die.

Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.

A fanatic is a man who, when he's lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his effort.

He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.

If we knew exactly what to expect throughout the Solar System, we would have no reason to explore it.

What five books would I like to be remembered for? Well... Tau Zero, I like that one especially. It was somewhat of a tour de force, and I think it got across what I was trying for.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.

Love has no time constraints.There is no time frame for when a person can fall in love with another, it just happens.It's spontaneous, unpredictable, it's timeless.

Encouragement of higher education for our youth is critical to the success of our collective future.

Resisting a beautiful chocolate cake or a wonderful foie gras is as difficult as (the idea of) saying no to Paul Newman.

My running style was kind of just head-on, because I couldn't dance.

What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.

I put heavy emphasis on the characters.

Indeed, moderation is my middle name (though I do not often use it in signing legal documents)

I have no patience for those in the American Jewish community who just go around slandering people as anti-Semites without realizing that what they're doing is really trivializing anti-Semitism.