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Man doesn’t have to take a gamble just ’cause it’s there. You got to learn that.

Once introduced into this world, life would never leave—there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more.

There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.

“You’ll never get it to follow orders.”

“Slaves follow orders, Colonel. You want something done a slave can’t, you don’t ask for a slave to do it.”

(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

I would have to look, try to find a bridge that would make plausible what I knew but could scarcely prove. The standards of science are austere, unforgiving—and who would have it differently? I would have to hedge, to take one step back for each two forward, to compare and suggest and contrast, always sticking close to the data. And despite what I thought I knew now, the data would have to lead, they would have to show the way.

But the answers come when they will, one piece at a time.

Talkers never acted when they could talk.

One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river had died a very honorable death. His boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. Then he went out over the breast-board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; But there is no instance of a pilot deserting his post to save his life while by remaining and sacrificing it he might secure other lives from destruction. It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too.

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in his first novel, Player Piano, some people love problem-solving and tinkering—and that is the final, irreducible driver of human history. Wars and faiths and leaders come and go, but the problem-solvers’ slow, steady work is the fulcrum upon which history turns.

“You know, my dear, you’re wrong that suffering ennobles people.” She’d stopped to massage her hip, wincing. “It simply makes one cross.”

Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both proved dangerous in the long run, which made them even more interesting.