Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Surely, if we take on thinking partners - or, at the least, thinking servants - in the form of machines, we will be more comfortable with them, and will relate to them more easily, if they are shaped like humans. It will be easier to be friends with human-shaped robots than with specialized machines of unrecognizable shape. And I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, even if they are only the friends we build ourselves.

If I had felt then as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I had married her, nothing could possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. Dates, yes. Sexual adventures, yes. But to pin myself permanently inside closed quarters with a smoker? Never. Never. Never. Beauty wouldn't count, sweetness wouldn't count, suitability in every other respect wouldn't count.

Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy.

Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.

The whole world might know you and acclaim you, but someone in the past, forever unreachable, forever unknowing, spoils it all.