Friday

Don’t kid yourself, Friday; knowing too much is a capital offense. In politics it always has been.

Stupid fools look just as good as military geniuses until the fighting starts.

I think that you are immune to the temptations of religion. If you are not, I cannot help you, any more than I could keep you from acquiring a drug habit. A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong—and you are strong. The great trouble with religion—any religion—is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask in at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason—but one cannot have both.

But I do not willingly involve us in nationalistic wars; the side of the angels is seldom self-evident.

You’re not a stranger; you’re an old friend we haven’t known very long.

I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people—and parasites.

“Georges, I don’t know much about California politics—”

“My dear, no one knows much about California politics, including California politicians.”

Marriages are arranged in heaven but the bills must be paid here on earth.

“Religious” = “absolute belief without proof.”

All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts; those who know this and those who do not.

People who are busy and happy don’t write diaries; they are too busy living.

Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population.

My mistake. My inexcusable mistake, as a con man never stops being a con man; he can’t. But I suffered from a will to believe, a defect of character that I thought I had rooted out. I was mistaken.

I had learned lately that wanting something and being able to pay for it were not the same.

Young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.

Those who spoke of “energy scarcity” and of “conserving energy” simply did not understand the situation. The sky was “raining soup”; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.

Friday, brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value. Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving the stupid ones in place.

I had hit him in his male pride.

Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.

Las Vegas is a three-ring circus with a hangover.

“So far as I have listened, before a revolution can take place, the population must lose faith in both the police and the courts.”

“Elementary. Go on.”

“Well…high taxation is important and so is inflation of the currency and the ratio of the productive to those on the public payroll. But that’s old hat; everybody knows that a country is on the skids when its income and outgo get out of balance and stay that way—even though there are always endless attempts to wish it away by legislation.”

Friday, don’t despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool, merit or demerit lies in how it is used.

It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can’t be enforced weakens all other laws.

Self-pity, he said, is the most demoralizing of all vices.