It's a long story. Want a refill?" "No, let's start the steak. Where's the button?" "Right here." "Well, push it." "Me? You offered to cook." "Ben Caxton, I will lie here and starve before I will get up to push a button six inches from your finger" "As you wish." He pressed the button. "But don't forget who cooked dinner.

There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.

But space travel can't ease the pressure on a planet grown too crowded not even with today's ships and probably not with any future ships-because stupid people won't leave the slopes of their home volcano even when it starts to smoke and rumble. What space travel does do is drain off the best brains: those smart enough to see a catastrophe before it happens, and with the guts to pay the price-abandon home, wealth, friends, relatives, everything-and go. That's a tiny fraction of one percent. But that's enough.

Men rarely if ever dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival.

A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld.

Behind every mystery lies another mystery.