Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed.

The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.

In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.

The cell door slammed behind Rubishov.

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.