I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works.

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.

The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

I feel like a tiger right now. There's nothing impossible if you get up and work for it.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

My theme song is always: "Pay attention to your viewer. Follow them."

Painting is just like making an after-dinner speech. If you want to be remembered, say one thing and stop.

I was student council president in high school, and even in law school, I was vice-president of the student bar association.

A big secular thing going on is technology and deflation. This is where I think millennials are getting that it is an improvement in life, and they're taking advantage of it.

The people are grown very wild and loose in their morals.

Success is not a harbor but a voyage with its own perils to the spirit ... The lesson that most of us on this voyage never learn, but can never quite forget, is that to win is sometimes to lose.

Flowers really do intoxicate me.