When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences .
The mere making of a decision sometimes had as much power as any action. Purpose clarified every move, every thought.
One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better.
“Weapons officer. Prepare to fire on my command.”
“He’s a weapons officer. You’d think he’d already be prepared.”
A weapon is a device for changing your enemy’s mind.
You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!
The Holmes-Ginsbook device is now a household item. The popularity of the device is such that its name has been shortened to the final syllable and increasing numbers of people are calling them simply “books.”
This eliminates my name, but I have my Nobel Prize and a contract to write a book on the intimate details surrounding the discovery for a quarter million dollar advance. Surely that is enough. Scientists are simple souls and once they have fame, wealth and girls, that’s all they ask.
Nothing is impossible! Not if you can imagine it. That’s what being a scientist is all about!
I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m going, or where I’ve been. I was born to save the Doctor, but the Doctor is safe now. I’m the Impossible Girl, and my story is done.
I’m a winner only because Rudy’s genius made it impossible for me to lose.
They’d done it, the tiny corner of her brain which could still work realized. These were the people who had done the impossible—who had conquered Hell itself for her—and she couldn’t think now, could no longer plan or anticipate. And it didn’t matter that she’d led them, or that the odds had been unbeatable, or that no one could possibly have done what they had. None of that mattered at all. She was taking them home, and they were taking her home, and that was all in the universe that mattered.
Numbers do not lie.
Politics and poetry, promises, these are lies.
Numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of God.
What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
I understand you’ll have some questions but we’re somewhat short on time.
Civilization moved fast, fast, after your century. There is not much time.
It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
People like you always forget, civilization has a lag time. Like light delay. You come out here, and you think because you’re civilized, civilization comes with you.
Here is the grand sweep of civilization’s paw, stretched against the black between the stars, a comfort to every ship’s captain when she looks out into the void and hopes not to see anything looking back. Here, in star-charts, the division of the universe into empire and otherwise, into the world and not the world.
But the area in which the ants’ skills made the most meaningful contribution to the advancement of civilization, besides writing, was scientific experimentation. Thanks to the ants’ capacity for intricate work, it was now possible to take measurements with an exactitude that had eluded dinosaurs, allowing a shift in experimentation from the qualitative to the quantitative.