The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

Is evolution just another name for God?

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.