The invisible hand never picks up the check.

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

Below the 40th latitude there is no law; below the 50th no god; below the 60th no common sense and below the 70th no intelligence whatsoever.

Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.