“The sort of guardian you can hire is worth about as much as the sort of wife you can buy.”
“Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth—you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.”
“If I’ve reached the place where I’m a good influence on anybody, it’s time I cultivated some new vices.”
“She might get high enough to crash—no higher.”
“This school is based on the idea that a man who can think correctly will automatically behave morally—or”
“A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realized that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.”
“Strictly speaking, the Patrol is not a military organization at all.” “Sir?” “I know, I know—you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.”
“Men on the surface of a planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity working for him.”
“They flew her,” Matt pointed out. “Sure they did—and my hat’s off to them. But it takes heroes to fly a box as primitive as this and I’m not the hero type.”
“a kiss that tasted like love and felt like madness,”
“He was a good man, but he had a broken heart. That’ll take even the best of them down.”
“...and now I just keep running. Maybe not physically anymore, but my mind and heart are backpacking through the darkest corners of the world trying to get farther and farther away.”
“Margie Flynn was in my head like a bad cold, blurring everything. It was a new kind of loneliness, a hurt I couldn’t stop picking at.”
“Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. “Categories” is a nicer, more neutral word than “stereotypes,” but it’s the same thing. Cognitive psychologists consider stereotypes to be energy-saving devices that allow us to make efficient decisions on the basis of past experience; help us quickly process new information and retrieve memories; make sense of real differences between groups; and predict, often with considerable accuracy, how others will behave or how they think.24 We wisely rely on stereotypes and the quick information they give us to avoid danger, approach possible new friends, choose one school or job over another, or decide that that person across this crowded room will be the love of our lives.”
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