Call it my little gesture toward social conscience, but I like to think I'm teaching a certain number of people to read. Now that sounds pretentious!

All social workers want is to get everyone involved in a programme. Because a programme provides full employment for three generations of social workers. And they mess up.

When they ran out of cadre men they gave me my very own platoon and said, 'Here are 63 men, try to keep as many of them alive as you possibly can.' That was one of the more harrowing experiences of my life.

I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

Call it my little gesture toward social conscience, but I like to think I'm teaching a certain number of people to read. Now that sounds pretentious!

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.

If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own.

I've fallen back on this periodically, although I must say that getting out of the grocery business ranked right up there with getting out of the army as one of the happier experiences of my life.

This is terrible, when a writer is bored by his own work, but it was a real bomb and had reached the point where I couldn't even stand to look at it any more.

The unfortunate thing about working for yourself is that you have the worst boss in the world. I work every day of the year except at Christmas, when I work a half day.

Reed College required a thesis for a Bachelor's degree. Normally a Bachelor's is sort of like being stamped 'Prime US Beef.' They just walk you through, hand out the diplomas and you fill in your name later on.

I taught in a small teacher's college for three or four years, at which point all the administrators got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't.

I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine.

I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

I'm a storyteller, not a prophet. I'm just interested in a good story.

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

I think that if there are positions that you can't argue... then the responsibility is probably to resign. If one's own conscience is opposed to the requirements and responsibilities of the job, then it's time to leave the job.

We cannot appeal to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures.

Maybe I'll learn how, but the only thing I can do is turn down parts that would hurt my conscience.

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

When your conscience says law is immoral, don't follow it.

It wouldn't sit easily on one's conscience that you had been warned and there could be danger, but nevertheless you went ahead and said let's dispense these drugs.

Claiming for ourselves liberty of conscience, liberty to worship, we shall see to it that every other individual enjoys the same right.

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.

Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Living with a conscience is like driving with the brakes on.

No, moral conscience is one thing, the law is another. We have to hold onto this difference.

God expects from men something more than at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.

To admit there is no god is to provide free license to pillage and rape with clear conscience.

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist.

No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations. He's got to put all his talent and feeling into them!

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Memorials become relics if they do not stir our modern conscience.

The U.N. acts as the world's conscience, and over eighty-five percent of the work that is done by the United Nations is in the social, economic, educational and cultural fields.