Randall Garrett

"There were people, Malone had always understood, who bounced out of their beds and greeted each new day with a smile. It didn’t sound possible, but then again there were some pretty strange people."

"“I’m sure,” Malone said. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” “Oh,” Blake said. After a second he added: “What does that mean?” Malone shrugged. “It’s an old saying,” he told the doctor. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. It just sounds good.” “Oh,” Blake said again."

"Malone, meanwhile, put in two weeks sitting glumly at his Washington desk and checking reports as they arrived. They were uniformly depressing. The United States of America contained more sub-normal minds than Malone cared to think about. There seemed to be enough of them to explain the results of any election you were unhappy over."

"I’m not a hard man to convince. And when I see the truth, I’m the first one to admit it, even if it makes me look like a nut."

"Miss Thompson may be off her trolley, but the others haven’t even got any tracks."

"Boyd looked up. “Rome,” he said in an absent fashion, “wasn’t built in a daze.”"

"All that was necessary was to use one’s imagination to see how it might have happened, and then check the evidence to see if it did happen that way. The final step is to check the evidence to make sure it could not have happened any other way."

"In general he doesn’t know any more about magic than an ostrich knows about icebergs."

"Are you an accessory to this imbecilic tomfoolery?"

"One of the troubles with the world is that so few laymen take an interest in science."

"Any group which makes a claim to infallibility must be very careful not to make any mistakes, and the mistakes that will inevitably occur must be kept secret or explained away—by lies, subterfuges and distortions. And that will eventually cause the collapse of the entire edifice."

"The plans of men do not necessarily coincide with those of the Universe."

"Master Sean O’Lochlainn had always been partial to mules. “The mule,” he was fond of saying, “is as much smarter than a horse as a raven is smarter than a falcon. Neither a raven nor a mule will go charging into combat just because some human tells him to.”"

"Amidst all the hubbub, wine and beer crossed the bar in one direction, while copper and silver crossed it in the other, making everyone happy on both sides."

"“You intend to pray for answers to those questions, my lord?” “That, yes. But I have found that the best way to ask God about questions like these is to go out and dig up the data yourself.”"

"It had been one of those warm late spring days when no air moves and nothing else wants to. Not oppressively hot—just warm enough to enervate and to cause attacks of acute vernal inertia."

"I have always contended that the true connoisseur is to be pitied, for he has trained his taste to such perfection that he enjoys almost nothing."

"I had been ready to die. In the only way I could reckon it, less than two days ago I had come to terms with the fact that I would be dead within a year. To face such a truth, to let it penetrate down to the core of your being, demands incredible effort and indescribable pain. No matter how much life you’ve had, you want more. There are things undone, words unsaid, potentials unexplored. You know you could have done more with your life, and you beg fate, or whatever god you believe in, to give you more time. You know in your heart that another entire lifetime would not be sufficient, yet you pray for just a few more years."

"Philosophically, Nirvana and the Final Blackout were equally unappealing to me. Reincarnation—well, it seemed like wishful thinking to me. The defining factor for my entire attitude toward an afterlife of any kind was the total absence of objective evidence."

"One of the things that had led me to be skeptical about reincarnation had been a uniform quality of silliness in the Westerners I had met who professed to “remember” past lives. The Hindu or the Buddhist of eastern Asia bears his belief with dignity. It is part of a religion. To so many Westerners, it was a topic for discussion at cocktail parties."

"The “remembered” lives had always been exciting and ended in murder, execution, or dramatic suicide. Not one of them had been a potato farmer who died quietly in his bed after seventy years of monotonous hard work. I had heard the argument that only violent personalities survived intact, but I frankly saw more late-night television than actual memory in the “past lives” I heard retold."

"No, I had kept an open mind about reincarnation—in spite of those people, not because of them."

"What does it matter? I asked myself. If you’re writing a fairy tale, don’t quibble over talking bears."

"To crave power is to be ruled by madness."