“We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma ...”

“People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been a...”

“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-...”

“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a const...”

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for...”

“Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.”

“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.”

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”

“Hi. I'm here to enlist.You can't. You aren't human.You see, little fella, we don't do sociological stuff like "interspeciated workplaces." We're a crack company of space mercenaries. We do "hurting...”

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”

“We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.”

“Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practiceIt demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but wi...”

“Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.”