My family were staunch believers in physical violence, not automatic violence, and we had a Safeway around the corner, so we never really needed to kill anything.
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.
There is no history, only histories.
We have become makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.
Simple statements are to be prized more highly than less simple ones because they tell us more; because their empirical content is greater; and because they are better testable.
Science is perhaps the only human activity in which errors are systematically criticized and, in time, corrected.
Oil is a very important component of economic growth.
I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places.
Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.
It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you.