True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

Science is magic that works.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

This is Sunday, and the question arises, what'll I start tomorrow?

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.

I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.