Robert Silverberg

"I have come to prefer something looser, a rough sort of definition which says simply that science fiction attempts to portray that which does not exist, a speculative reality, but endeavors to explore the consequences of such a speculation in a rigorous, systematic, and scientifically plausible way."

"“The fascination of what’s difficult,” said Chalk. “It spins the world on its bearings.”"

"But, though he trusted his intuitive judgments, he rarely acted on them until he had had time to make a more rational reconnaissance."

"Of course, Chalk had little need for further money. It had motivated him once, but not now. Nor did the acquisition of greater power please him much. Despite the customary theories, Chalk had attained sufficient power so that he was willing to stop expanding if only he could be sure of holding what he had. No, it was something else, something inner, that governed his decisions now. When the love of money and the love of power are both sated, the love of love remains."

"She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood."

"“Do I chatter?” “Should I be honest or should I be tactful?”"

"She was strikingly ignorant, but he had known that from the start. What he had not known was how quickly her ignorance would cease to seem charming and would begin to seem contemptible."

"I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds."

"He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people."

"Forget it. No, don’t forget it. Don’t forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense."

"“I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven’t you discovered that yet?” “It doesn’t have to stink!” Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. “Is that the lesson you’ve learned in all those years? The universe doesn’t stink. Man stinks! And he does it by voluntary choice because he’d rather stink than smell sweet! We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to cheat. We could opt for honor and decency and—” Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, “I sound young as hell to you, don’t I, Charles?” “You’re entitled to make mistakes,” Boardman said. “That’s what being young is for.” “You genuinely believe and know that there’s a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?” Boardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. “I wouldn’t put it that way. There’s no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there’s a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn’t give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There’s nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress it’s a stinking deal.”"

"“I’m asking you to do an unpleasant thing for a decent motive. You don’t want to do it, and I understand how you feel, but I’m trying to get you to see that your personal moral code isn’t always the highest factor. In wartime, a soldier shoots to kill because the universe imposes that situation on him. It may be an unjust war, and that might be his brother in the ship he’s aiming at, but the war is real and he has his role.” “Where’s the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?” “There isn’t any. That’s why I say the universe stinks.” “We have no freedom at all?” “The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.” “Have you felt this way all your life?” “Most of it,” Boardman said. “When you were my age?” “Even earlier.”"

"You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly."

"“The cages are ready in case any of the enemies are captured.” “You mean us?” “Yes. Enemies.” Muller’s eyes glittered with sudden paranoid fury; it was alarming how easily he slipped from rational discourse to that cold blaze. “Homo sapiens. The most dangerous, the most ruthless, the most despicable beast in the universe!” “You say it as if you believe it.” “I do.”"

"Stand near me and you get sick. Why? It reminds you that you’re an animal too, because you get a full dose of me. So we go round and round in our endless feedback. You hate me because you learn things about your own soul by getting near me. And I hate you because you must draw back from me. What I am, you see, is a plague carrier, and the plague I carry is the truth. My message is that it’s a lucky thing for humanity that we’re shut up each in his own skull. Because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurry nonverbal thing I’ve got, we’d be unable to stand each other. Human society would be impossible."

"The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant."

"Now, you know I’m no bigot, Lorie. I don’t care how many eyes, tentacles, eating orifices, or antennae an organism happens to have, so long as it knows its stuff. What I object to is having someone who is professionally inferior jacked into an expedition simply for the sake of racial balance."

"They equally detest our third boss, who is Pilazinool of Shilamak, the big expert on intuitive analysis. Which means the science of jumping to conclusions. He’s good at it."

"The thing about aliens is that they tend to be so alien."

"The funeral customs of alien races defy all comprehension. So do the funeral customs of non-alien races. Can you explain to me the virtue of putting dead people in a box and burying the box in the ground?"

"The higher powers reward us most tenderly by their absence from our lives."

"Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured."

"Nothing was his business, these days. When a man had no business, he had to appoint himself to some. So he was here to do research, ostensibly, which is to say to snoop and spy."

"When you treat a rational autonomous creature as though he’s a mere beast, what does that make you?"

"What counts is what’s happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that’s a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day."

"Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you."

"She seems fond of him. Getting to know him better, as though she has surmounted the barrier of cultural differences that made him seem so alien to her before. And he the same with her. The separations dwindling. Her world is not his, but he thinks he could adjust to some of its unfamiliar assumptions. Strike up a closeness. He’s a man, she’s a woman, right? The basics. All the rest is façade."

"But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition."

"It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself."

"You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams."

"But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank."

"How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!"

"The style in which it was written told me much: I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice."

"All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context."

"Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul."

"Love of others begins with love of self."

"What value is lineage to a drowning man?"

"“All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.”"

"My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles."

"Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all."

"Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject."

"The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die."

"Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art?"

"We are born by accident into a purely random universe."

"In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing."

"Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers."

"“This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.” “So?” “What do I need it for?” “Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.”"

"No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there."

"So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men."

"It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality."