Our civilization has decided ... that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained ...men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other... men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to government founded on force. There is not, among the most r...eligious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a s...keptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it: we "make th...ings up." This is our trade. I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along th...e primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as a...n adult, in order to deny him consolation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The educational system in large countries will always be utterly mediocre, for the same reason that the cooking in large kitchens ...is mediocre at best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »