If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We're all god.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

My business is to prevent the future.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.

If you are going to describe the history of animation, you'd look at the early Disney work, then 'Bugs Bunny,' 'Road Runner' and other Warner Brothers theatrical productions. But when you got to 'Rocky and Bullwinkle,' you'd see they were unique: They assumed you had a brain in your head.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that.

We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.

First grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.

I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

Everything is generated through your own will power.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.