What am I asking?

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

Vernor Vinge

There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Olivia: What's a drunken man like, fool?Feste: Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman: one draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns him.

William Shakespeare

People have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Woman and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are in danger.

Jean Paul Richter

Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.

Jean Toomer

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.

Edouard Manet

By the time Obama came into office, Washington had already agreed over a period of a few weeks to a $700 billion government infusion into the world banking system. Nothing of the sort had ever been done before, and it was done spit spot with very little national debate.

John Podhoretz

People must be taken as they are, and we should never try make them or ourselves better by quarreling with them.

Edmund Burke

In the end, nature is inexorable: it has no reason to hurry and, sooner or later, it takes what belongs to it. Unconsciously and inflexibly obedient to its own laws, it doesn't know art, just as it doesn't know freedom, just as it doesn't know goodness.

Ivan Turgenev

There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer

Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.

Tama Janowitz