Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends, but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere.

Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it.

Everything starts as somebody's daydream.

In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.

Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing.

One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.

A civilization has the ethics it can afford