Almost anything, if it goes on long enough, can be reduced to, first a Routine, and then, to a Tradition. And at the point it is, obviously, Necessary.
According to tradition, the man who held the Galactic Medal of Honor could do no wrong. In a strange way, Captain Don Mathers was to learn that this was true.
A gun is an interesting weapon; it can be hired, of course, and naturally doesn't care who hires it. Something much the same can be said of the gunman, too....
It would, of course, take a trio of Ivory Tower scientists to conceive of tracking down that statistical entity, the Common Man, and testing out an idea on him. And only the Ivory Tower type would predict that...
An Alien landing on Earth might be readily misled, victimized by a one-sided viewpoint. And then again ... it might be the Earthmen who were misled....
Every status-quo-caste society in history has left open two roads to rise above your caste: The Priest and The Warrior. But in a society of TV and tranquilizers--the Warrior acquires a strange new meaning....
Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The first envoy from another world was about to speak--that is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....
That he was a phony Swami was beyond doubt. That he was a genuine prophet, though, seemed ... but then, what's the difference between a dictator and a true prophet? So was he....
First published anonymously, March 1880, and soon in various unauthorized editions. It wasn't until the 1925 edition that Adams was listed as author. Henry Adams remarked (ironically as usual), "The wholesale...
When a man has a great deal of knowledge, it becomes extremely easy for him to confuse "knowledge" with "wisdom" ... and forget that the antonym of "wisdom" is not "ignorance" but "folly."
In any status-hungry culture, the level a man is assigned depends on what people think he is—not on what he is. And that, of course, means that only the deliberately phony has real status!
