Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.

Ethics change with technology.

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

We learn only to ask more questions.

It's very difficult for a black man to get out of South-Central Los Angeles, and get out civilized....The only men I know who have escaped, all began reading Robert Heinlein at age ten.

One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.

Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think

I'm a romantic you have to be to marry four times.

Peaceful coexistence cannot be limited to the powerful countries if we want to ensure world peace.

I have no doubt that the fundamental problem the planet faces is the enormous increase in the human population

The heart can only be broken / once, like a window.

Anybody whose mind is functioning at all can't be content with the way the world works.

The 21st Century has begun as an era of uncertainty, with a heightened focus on security and public safety.

Cafe society is as old as the hills. Starbucks and its imitators are the coffee face of the new man in a hurry.

I just want to thank everybody I have ever met in my entire life.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.