Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Analogy is even slipperier than logic.
Nobody has ever seen an electron. Nor a thought. You can't see a thought, you can't measure, weigh, nor taste it- but thoughts are the most real things in the Galaxy.
In handling a stinging insect, move very slowly.
Around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned.
Magic is not science, it is a collection of ways to do things ways that work but often we don't know why.
To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced weakens all other laws.
One should not attend even the end of the world without a good breakfast.
Faith is intellectual laziness.
In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.
Most 'scientists' are bottle washers and button sorters.
Nor would anybody suspect. If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor.
Work is not an end in itself; there must always be time enough for love.
I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much . . . because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.
The future is better than the past. Despite the crepe hangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands ... with tools ... with horse sense and science and engineering.
Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it - especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.
If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. It has long been known that one horse can run faster than another - but which one? Differences are crucial.
But I contend that the disgusting behavior of many of their alleged 'holy men' relieves us of any intellectual obligation to take the stuff seriously. No amount of sanctimonious rationalization can make such behavior anything but pathological.
Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.
Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.
Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.
Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival.
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