The Fountains Of Paradise

Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can't think of it.

There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations.

The fates could not possibly be so malevolent, now that he had only a few hundred meters to go.

He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway, after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed when there were only millimeters to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment.

The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.

If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.

Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa's heaven was only an illusion.

Long ago, he had made that choice between work and life that can seldom be avoided at the highest levels of human endeavor ... Any fool could shuffle genes, and most did. But whether or not history gave him credit, few men could have achieved what he had done — and was about to do.

Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.

Meanwhile, among all its countless other effects upon human culture, Starglider had brought to its climax a process that was already well under way. It had put an end to the billions of the words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.

Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.

One fail-safe after another had let them down. Helped by the ionospheric storm, the sheer perversity of inanimate things struck again.

I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me.

“I am the King.” Ah, but which king? The monarch who had stood on these granite flagstones — scarcely worn then, eighteen hundred years ago — was probably an able and intelligent man; but he failed to conceive that the time could ever come when he would fade into an anonymity as deep as that of his humblest subjects.