Fritz Leiber

"After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. It all depends on the evidence. The evidence decides everything."

"Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class."

"What is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb."

"A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences."

"Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all."

"What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?"

"Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse."

"He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest With the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood."

"Hey, am I dreaming?...Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line? The second question, though not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for paranoia!"

"The only thing robots couldn’t do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition."

"For a full century now Americans have been living in one of those ages of collective madness and herd delusion, comparable only to the Dutch tulip mania, the witchcraft dread, the dancing madness, Trotskyism, and the Crusades. Until 1950 ours might have been called the Automobile Mania, but now the imagination can only grope for a name—I’m writing an unpopular book on the subject, you see. Not that this current social madness is a deep secret or anything to be startled at. What other results could have been expected when American society began to overvalue on the one hand security, censorship, an imagined world-saving idealism and self-sacrifice in war, and on the other hand insatiable hunger for possessions, fiercely competitive aggressiveness, sadistic male belligerence, contempt for parents and the state, and a fantastically overstimulated sexuality?"

"They sat in small parties with a truculent quietness that sneered at and challenged the frantic hustle of the times and the belief that the hustle was leading anywhere."

"What have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!"

"I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten."

"It’s this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos — and don’t tell me that isn’t in the cards! — masquerading as benign omniscient authority."

"Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards."

"In the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it’s true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless accidents."

"Sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn’t once entirely different from anything we remember, and we’ve forgotten that we forgot."

"Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time."

"Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself."

"Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past’s mistakes and the future’s fears."

"For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?"

"Humans aren’t as you idealized them, Blanda. Humans are dream-killers. They took the bubbles out of soapsuds, Blanda, and called it detergent. They took the moonlight out of romance and called it sex."

""Excuse me, Gaspard,” Flaxman interjected, “but would you mind turning the emotional down and the factual up?”"

"Their feeble attempts to appear concerned only made them look to him more like two fat cats full of stolen cream and with a map of the secret tunnel leading to the meat locker tucked inside their fur vests."

"“How like humans,” he said drily. “The universe is vast, majestic, intricate, patterned with inexhaustible beauty, vivid with infinitely varied life—and there’s only one thing in it that really interests you. The same thing that makes you buy books, build families, create atomic theories (I imagine) or, once upon a time, write poetry. Sex.”"

"To Space-Age man, every mystery is a greed-magnet."

"I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!"

"It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens."

"There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky."

"They’ve heard about space but they still don’t believe in it. They haven’t been out here to see for themselves that there isn’t any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say “planet” and “spaceship” to them, they still think “horoscope” and “flying saucer”."

"Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours."

"Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted ‘communications industry’ had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other."

"There was an omnipresent sense of crisis."

"The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence."

"Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order."

"Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried."

"The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils."

"What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence — liking yourself’s the beginning of all love."

"Science has only increased the area of the unknown. And if there is a God, her name is Mystery."

"You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior."

"It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did."

""Zu jedem Zeitpunkt der Geschichte hat es eine oder zwei Städte der monströsen Art gegeben"

"Welchen Sinn hatte das Leben überhaupt? Er hatte sich mühsam aus den Fesseln des Alkoholismus befreit, nur um dem Nasenlosen, jetzt mit einer neuen, länglichen Maske, erneut gegenüberzustehen."

"Da wir gerade von Glück usw. sprechen: es hat mir auch viel eingebracht, daß ich sehr intensiv mit H.P. Lovecraft in den letzten acht Monaten seines Lebens korrespondiert habe. Er hämmerte mir ein, daß man beim Schreiben auf Ehrlichkeit, Überzeugung, Sorgfalt, Vollkommenheit und Wissenschaftlichkeit achten muß."

"Aber ich weiß, daß wir nicht einmal den milliardsten Bruchteil dessen verstehen, was im Kosmos vor sich geht."