Hugo Award Winners

"Given brawn and brains and enough time there’s always a way in or out. Escapees shot down as they bolted had chosen the wrong time and wrong place, or the right time and wrong place, or the right place at the wrong time. Or they’d neglected brawn in favor of brains, a common fault of the impatient. Or they’d neglected brains in favor of brawn, a fault of the reckless."

"Whenever Man was unable to master his invoice with this bare hands, thought Leeming, the said environment got bullied or coerced into submission by Man plus X. That had been so from the beginning of time—Man plus a tool or a weapon. But X did not have to be anything concrete or solid, it did not have to be lethal or even visible. It could be a dream, an idea, an illusion, a bloody big thundering lie, just anything. There was only one true test—whether it worked."

"The stupid believe because they are credulous. The intelligent do not blindly accept but, when aware of their own ignorance, neither do they reject."

"“After all, somebody has to do the paperwork.” “I’d agree if the paperwork was necessary and made sense.” “If there wasn’t any paperwork, we’d both be out of a job.” “You've got something there. So on this planet there are two thousands of us sitting on our fundaments busily making work for each other.”"

"He thinks he’s heap big. To me he’s just a big heap."

"Put out the light and there is stumbling in the dark."

"“The World Council,” Railton snorted. “All they’re interested in is exploration, discovery and trade. All they can think of is culture and cash. They’re completely devoid of any sense of peril.” “Not being military officers,” Ashmore pointed out, “they can hardly be expected to exist in a state of perpetual apprehension.”"

"“Back at Terran H.Q.,” said Maxwell, “one is not shot at dawn for sabotage, treachery, assassination or any equally trifling misdeed. One is blindfolded and stood against the wall for not filling out forms, or for filling out the wrong ones, or for filling out the right ones with the wrong details.”"

"Superior life does not establish itself by benefit of brains alone; manual dexterity is equally essential."

"Obviously riled, he growled at Lawson, “The right to unobstructed passage covers our vessels as much as anyone else’s.” “It covers no warship bearing instructions to intercept, question, search or detain any other spaceship it considers suspicious,” declared the other. “Violators of the law are not entitled to claim protection of the law.” “Can you tell me how to conduct a war between systems without sending armed ships through space?” asked Markhamwit, bitterly sarcastic. Lawson waved an indifferent hand. “We aren’t the least bit interested in that problem. It is your own worry.” “It cannot be done,” Markhamwit shouted. “That’s most unfortunate,” remarked Lawson, full of false sympathy. “It creates an awful state of no-war.” “Are you trying to be funny?” “Is peace funny?” “War is a serious matter,” bawled Markhamwit, striving to retain a grip on his temper. “It cannot be ended with a mere flick of the finger.” “The fact should be borne in mind by those who so nonchalantly start them,” advised Lawson, quite unmoved by the Great Lord’s ire. “The Nileans started it.” “They say that you did.” “They are incorrigible liars.” “That’s their opinion of you, too.” A menacing expression on his face, Markhamwit said, “Do you believe them?” “We never believe opinions.” “You are evading my question. Somebody has to be a liar. Who do you think it is?” “We haven’t looked into the root-causes of your dispute. It is not our woe. So without any data to go upon we can only hazard a guess.” “Go ahead and do some hazarding then,” Markhamwit invited. He licked expectant lips. “Probably both sides have little regard for the truth,” opined Lawson, undeterred by the other’s attitude. “It is the usual setup. When war breaks out the unmitigated liar comes into his own. His heyday lasts for the duration. After that, the victorious liars hang the vanquished ones.”"

"Reasonableness is strength. Irrationality is weakness."

"Nobody knew better than the Solarians that wars are not caused , declared or willingly fought by nations, planetary peoples or shape-groups, for these consist in the main of plain, ordinary folk who crave nothing more than to be left alone. The real culprits are power-drunken cliques of near-maniacs who by dint of one means or another have coerced the rest."

"Inside their military minds conditioning masqueraded as logic."

"“Do you suppose that this other-life might be…might be…like us?” “I see no reason why not,” declared Bvandt, after some thought. “We are by far the highest form in the known cosmos, therefore any other high form must be similar.” “The logic of that is not evident.”"

"Markham was going to hand him a tough one. That was Markham’s job: to rake through a mess of laconic, garbled, distorted or eccentric reports, pick out the obvious problems and dump them squarely in the laps of whoever happened to be hanging around and was considered suitable to solve them. One thing could be said in favor of this technique: its victims often were bothered, bedeviled or busted, but at least they were never bored. The problems were not commonplace, the solutions sometimes fantastic."

"The first rule of captaincy is to consider the men before considering an exterior problem. There is no real solution to any predicament unless there is also the means to apply it."

"After this, doors had to be opened with all the caution of a tax collector coping with a mysterious parcel that ticks."

"If there’s one lesson we’ve learned in the cosmos it’s that of never despising an alien culture. A species too big to learn soon goes small."

"We first dug out sixteen thousand fluent speakers of the several Sirian dialects. Eliminating the females and children brought the number down to nine thousand. Then, step by step, we cut out the elderly, the infirm, the weak, the untrustworthy, the temperamentally unsuitable. We weeded out those too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too stupid, too rash, too cautious, and so forth. We weren't left with many among whom to seek for wasps."

"Listen to me. You were born in Masham, capital city of Diracta – the Sirian home planet. Your father was a trader there at the time. You lived on Diracta until the age of seventeen, when you returned with your parents to Terra."

"That was the kind of chance that must be taken when one holes up in known and regularly checked haunts. The risk was not enormous, in fact it was small – but it was still there. And when tried, sentenced and waiting for death it is no consolation to know that what came off was a hundred to one chance. To keep going and to maintain the one-man battle the enemy had to be outwitted, if possible, all along the line and all the time."

"When one is fighting a paper-war one uses paper-war tactics that in the long run can be just as lethal as high explosive. And the tactics are not limited in scope by use of one material. The said material is very variable in form. Paper can convey a private warning, a public threat, secret temptation, open defiance; wall-bills, window-stickers, leaflets dropped by the thousands from the roof-tops, cards left on seats or slipped into pockets and purses... money."

"Science fiction, like any other genuine literary form, must evolve. It was easier in the old days — easier to find ideas, easier to stop in the middle of everything for a dissertation on Jupiter's moons. The modern way, starting a story in the middle of a future- or other-world environment and taking it from there is a challenge to the writer. It isn't always easy, but it is fun."

"I can remember depending on people like Eric Frank Russell and J. T. Macintosh to give me a good, comfortable read, to tell me a story. Whether they told me anything I didn't know or hadn't thought about or read someplace else was another matter."

"He seemed to get along with just about everybody. Which, in my book, makes him suspect."

"The critics seem like the legendary blind philosophers who each touching the creature in a different place, bring back conflicting reports of what an elephant is. … I would like to suggest, with no pretensions to being any less blind than the others, that a key to these contradictions may be found in what appears to be the image in terms which Farmer most often presents himself as an artist, the trickster god. … Farmer seems to have a special affinity for Trickster."

"Farmer's greatest achievement, accomplished with brilliant understatement, is to make us gradually realize that our own situation here on Earth is just as mysterious as anything on Riverworld, or that the answer to the enigmas of Riverworld might also be the explanation of the paradoxes of our own peculiar existence here and now. Once again, in a brilliant climax, Farmer demonstrates my pet theory that sf is the only serious literature around these days, because it is the only literature that grapples with the ultimate questions of who or what we are and how we got here."

"One of the most original, one of the most talented, and certainly one of the most fearless writers around."

"Excellent science fiction writer; in fact, a far more skillful writer than I am."

"The truth is that you can be immortal, relatively so, anyway. You won't last beyond the death of the universe and probably not nearly as long as the universe does. But you have the potentiality for living a million years, two, perhaps three or more. As long as you can find a Terrestrial-type planet with a hot core and have resurrection machinery available. Unfortunately, not all can be permitted to possess immortality. Too many would make immortality miserable or hellish for the rest, and they would try to control others through their control of the resurrection machinery. Even so, everybody, without exception, is given a hundred years after his Earthly death to prove that he or she can live peacefully and in harmony with himself and the others, within the tolerable limits of human imperfections. Those who can do this will be immortal after the two projects are completed."

"How strange and unforeseeable! The world had been saved, not by great rulers and statesmen, not by mystics and saints and prophets and messiahs, not by any of the holy scriptures, but by an introverted eccentric writer of mathematical texts and children's books and by the child who'd inspired him. The little girl become a woman, dream-ridden Alice, had inspired the nonsense not really nonsense, and this in circuitous and spiraling fashion had inspired her to do what all others had failed to do, to save eighteen billion souls and the world."

"If the Creator has a plan for us, why doesn’t He tell us what it is? Are we so stupid that we can’t understand it? He should tell it to us directly! The books that the prophets, the revelators, and the revisionists wrote, claiming to have authority from God Himself, to have taken His dictations, these so-called revelations are false! They make no sense! Besides, they contradict each other! Does God make contradictory statements?"

"“Perhaps God—if there is one—doesn’t care,” Burton said. “There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.”"

"Burton sighed. She was, on the whole, sane. But she was also a religious fanatic who managed to ignore the facts of life and also the contradictory elements in her faith."

"“Okay,” she said, “I’ll listen to the wise. Are you wise?” “Wise enough,” he said, “and mighty experienced, which is the same thing if you’re not too stupid.”"

"You should have waited to find out the true situation, madame. But then…scarcely anyone ever does."

"By the Providence that did not exist, events had worked out perfectly."

"And how in God’s name did Santiago find out about the laser? Even Queen Victoria’s sex life wasn’t a better secret."

"Clemens was afraid that he’d lose his temper and cuss out King John as no one else in the universe had ever been cussed out before."

"Let's give this entity which you call soul another name. Soul has too many incorrect meanings for humans, too many verbal reverberations, too many contrary definitions."

"Now, this is what the visitor said the Ethicals had learned from the Ancients. The Creator, God, the One Spirit, call it what you will, forms all. It is the universe; the universe is it. But its body is formed of two essences. One is matter, the other, for lack of a better word, is nonmatter."

"By now you must have accepted the fact that your religion, in fact, none of the Earthly religions, truly knew what the afterlife would be. All made guesses, and then established these as articles of faith. Though, in a sense, some were near the mark, if you accept their revelations as symbolic."

"Sometimes I regret we are forbidden any violence whatsoever. Right now, I would like to kick you in the ass."

"Monasticism, retreat from the world, reclusivism, that’s a lot of crap."

"Sometimes you are arrogant, thinking you are better than others. More often you are humble. Too humble. I might even say, sickeningly humble. That is another form of arrogance. True humility is knowing your true place in the cosmic scale."

"If you live very long time or are immortal, perhaps you learn everything about everything in order to pass the time."

"I concluded that extreme mysticism was closely allied to madness."

"I have been forced into this situation and may like it. To survive you must lie better than the liars, deceive more than the deceivers, and kill the killers first! To me it’s sheer necessity, though justified!"

"Malory clung to his faith with fierce obliviousness to “facts”—in itself an indication that he had gone mad, if his critics were to be believed."

"Everybody should fear only one person, and that person should be himself."