Gold is the corpse of value.

If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas "Fscking" Edison.

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.

Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.

Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.