Essayists From England

"I doubt if such a word exists, and if it does, it shouldn’t."

"Purvis looked at him as though seeing something that had no right to be around in a world that had invented penicillin."

"There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed but nothing could be done about good men who were deluded."

"The extremists in his movement had discredited themselves thoroughly, and it would be a long time before the world heard of them again."

"“Very ingenious, like all your theories,” said Stormgren. “I wish you’d give them Opus numbers so that I could keep up with them. The objections to this one—”"

"Now there are some forms of apparel that may be worn or discarded as the fancy pleases with no other ill effects than a possible loss of social prestige. But spacesuits are not among them."

"A single neutron begins the chain-reaction that in an instant can destroy a million lives and the toil of generations. Equally insignificant and unimportant are the trigger-events which can sometimes change a man’s course of action and so alter the whole pattern of his future."

"It is surprising how long it takes to do a simple addition when your life depends on the answer."

"News that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth. Only good reports need confirmation."

"He was suddenly struck by an idea so brilliant that he was quite sure it could not possibly work."

"He had wished to convince himself that Comarre was evil. Now he knew that it was not. There would always be, even in Utopia, some for whom the world had nothing to offer but sorrow and disillusion."

"When I was a boy, Brayldon, my old master once said that time could never destroy the truth—it could only hide it among legends. He was right."

"Why should one be afraid of something merely because it is strange?"

"He knew something of the emotion the artist must feel when his dreams become reality."

"What was the use of wealth and power unless they could be used to shape one’s dreams?"

"We always thought the living earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery."

"Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death..."

"The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths."

"If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured."

"Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples."

"What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts—indeed, sometimes from no facts—in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control."

"Science demands patience."

"A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true."

"What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view."

"If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble...But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history."

"If children have interests then education happens."

"2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined."

"I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her."

"SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently."

"The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale."

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum."

"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these."

"I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.."

"I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington ... I'm reasonably sure there must be life in this solar system, on Mars or on Europa, and other places. I think life is probably going to be ubiquitous, though we still don't have any proof of that yet — and still less, any proof of intelligent life anywhere. But I hope that will be coming in the next decade or so through radio astronomy or, perhaps, the discovery of objects in space which are obviously artificial. Astronomical engineering — that may be the other thing to look for."

"The danger of asteroid or comet impact is one of the best reasons for getting into space ... I'm very fond of quoting my friend Larry Niven: "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!""

"We should be less concerned about adding years to life, and more about adding life to years. I have been very fortunate to have witnessed some of humanity's greatest achievements during the 20th century that is nearing its end. Yet we must admit that it has also been the most savage century in the history of our kind. If I can have one more wish, I want to see lasting and meaningful peace achieved in Sri Lanka as early as possible. But I am aware that peace cannot just be wished; it involves hard work, courage and persistence. As we welcome 2001, let us harness our collective energies to create a culture of peace and a land of prosperity."

"The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium."

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

"There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in Childhood's End. But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are. There are, for example, so many different religions — each of them claiming to have the truth, each saying that their truths are clearly superior to the truths of others — how can someone possibly take any of them seriously? I mean, that's insane. ...Though I sometimes call myself a crypto-Buddhist, Buddhism is not a religion. Of those around at the moment, Islam is the only one that has any appeal to me. But, of course, Islam has been tainted by other influences. The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I'm afraid."

"The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons."

"Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future. p. 97, Acknowledgements"

"The search for alien artefacts in the Solar System should be a perfectly legitimate branch of science ('exoarchaeology'?). Unfortunately, it has been largely discredited by claims that such evidence has already been found - and has been deliberately suppressed by NASA! p. 97, Acknowledgements"

"Their little universe is very young, and its god is still a child. But it is too soon to judge them; when We return in the Last Days, We will consider what should be saved. p. 88, Epilogue"

"Whatever godlike powers and principalities lurked beyond the stars, Poole reminded himself, for ordinary humans only two things were important - Love and Death. p. 87"

"Although Poole sometimes missed the cops-and-robbers dramas he had often enjoyed in his youth, he had grown to accept the current wisdom: excessive interest in pathological behaviour was itself pathological. p. 73"

"'I'm sorry,' he said. 'You're Commander Poole, of course. But I'm sure we've never met before.'...He was glad of the encounter, and was pleased to know that Danil was back in normal society. Whether his original crime had been axe-murders or overdue library books should no longer be the concern of his one-time employer; the account had been settled, the books closed. p. 73"

"Yes - crime. Always some... Society's irreducible noise level. What to do? Your solution - prisons. State-sponsored perversion factories - costing ten times average family income to hold one inmate! Utterly crazy... Obviously something very wrong with people who shouted loudest for more prisons - They should be psychoanalysed! But let's be fair - really no alternative before electronic monitoring and control perfected - you should see the joyful crowds smashing the prison walls then - nothing like it since Berlin fifty years earlier! p. 39"

"Once you asked me about crime nowadays - I said any such interest pathological - maybe prompted by the endless sickening television programmes of your time - never able to watch more than few minutes myself... disgusting!"

"Above all, there was the memory - and mystery - of Helena... It had begun as a casual affair, in the early days of his astrotraining, but had become more and more serious as the years went by. Just before he had left for Jupiter, they had planned to make it permanent when he returned. And if he did not, Helena wished to have his child. He still recalled the blend of solemnity and hilarity with which they had made the necessary arrangements..."