Excellence is where you find it. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
In a graduation address at Brigham Young University
Size only matters when you’re buying clothes.
(Talking about the relationship between body size and fighting ability)
Redevelopment: compulsory economic displacement, i.e. the forced exchange of undesirable (poor) for more desirable (wealthy) people. This is often referred to as “clean-up” and is accomplished through condemnation and grants.
Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and failed.
It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against the attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud.
Venture Science Fiction magazine
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Profiles of the Future
Women marry men, hoping they will change. Men marry women, hoping they will not. And so, each is inevitably disappointed.
I’m not looking for a handout; I’m just looking for a hand.
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
Describing an early precursor to today’s internet.
The Web is like Usenet, but the elephants are untrained.
(with apologies to Gene Spafford)
