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To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
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Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.
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I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
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I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.
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I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.
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Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me with a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last-round trip to Paradise: 'See you later, Alligator.'
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'Things don't stay the way they are,' said Finnerty. 'It's too entertaining to try to change them.'
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I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
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Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.
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Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for each reaction there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction. This can be useful in rocketry.
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Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
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True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
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Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
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Hey - guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?
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Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.
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His poor soul was flooded with pleasure as he realized that one friend was all that a man needed in order to be well-supplied with friendship.
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I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
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I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
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While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.' Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it.
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Why throw money at problems? That's what money is for.Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.
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There was not a country in the world that had not fought a battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from Mars.All was forgiven.All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
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Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor's sufferings and derring-do.
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I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.
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Don't lecture me on race relations. I don't have a molecule of prejudice. I've been in battle with every kind of man there is. I've been in bed with every kind of woman there is - from a Laplander to a Tierra del Fuegian. If I'd ever been to the South Pole, there'd be a hell of a lot of penguins who looked like me.