Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.

A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains, he gives to others.

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.

Kindness is the sunshine in which virtue grows.

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.

When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death - that is heroism.

What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.

A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy.

Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.

The time to be happy is now, and the place to be happy is here.

It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot.

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

There is a quiet about the life of a farmer, and the hope of a serene old age, that no other business or profession can promise.

Insolence is not logic; epithets are the arguments of malice.

Few rich men own their property; their property owns them.

Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and depth; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought.

I say that no man can be greater than the man who bravely and heroically sacrifices his life for the good of others. No man can be greater than the one who meets death face to face, and yet will not shrink from what he believes to be his highest duty.

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

The doctrine of immortality rests upon human affection. We love; therefore, we wish to live.

The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.

Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did and never will agree.

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more.

Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.

One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!'

I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.

You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets.

Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon.

I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't.

Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.

Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that.

People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.

When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future.

When I first started, my novels were set in the far future.

Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.

I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.