Sister Carlotta, I'm on a leave of absence right now. That means I've been sacked, in case you don't understand how the I.F. handles these things.” "Sacked! A miscarriage of justice. You ought to be shot.

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

If a pig goes upon the threshing-floor, or a field, or a garden, and the owner of the meadow, or the field, or the garden smites it so that it die, he shall give it back to its owner; but if he does not give it back, he becomes a thief.

Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.

That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no disaster, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third.

A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself