Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.

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.

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.

There are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals can believe in them, particularly left-wing intellectuals.

Love has no Terms and Conditions

I really can't be bothered going to a barber. And shaving every morning, that's nightmarish. I spent my teenage years covered in tiny little bits of toilet paper.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

Unable to love each other, the English turn naturally to dogs

As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.

Don't fix what's not broken.

We've passed an energy bill in the House, to help us be less reliant upon foreign oil so we can get gas prices down. But nothing happens in the Senate.

Each one [movie] is very important to us and from a fiscal responsibility, filmmakers understand that it's highly personal for us and they've been great about it.

Why is it that for everything you gain in life, something is always lost?