What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?

People who hate in concrete terms are dangerous. People who manage to hate only in abstracts are the ones worth having for your friends.

"Pay him what was promised", said the caliph. "And put out his eyes."

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.