Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.
Robert G. Ingersoll, “Motley and Monarch,” The North American Review, December 1885.
A water heater is made to heat and hold water. It is begging you to do something that will change your life from gray to bright white: turn up the temperature!
Jeffrey Tucker, Hack Your Shower Head Plus 10 Other Ways to Get Big Government Out of Your Home (2012)
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C. Clarke, as quoted in Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century (1999) by Michio Kaku, p. 295
Crazy people do not apply the principle of scientific parsimony … they shoot for the baroque.
Philip K. Dick, VALIS (1981).
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
Mary Shelley, from the Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.
If you think this world is bad, you should see some of the others.
Philip K. Dick, the title of a 1977 speech published in the collection The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Often improved by swapping out “world” with “universe,” but this seems not to be authentic.