Stranger in a Strange Land

"This poor ersatz Martian is saying that sex is a way to be happy. Sex should be a means of happiness. Ben, the worst thing about sex is that we use it to hurt each other. It ought never to hurt; it should bring happiness, or at least pleasure. "The code says, 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.' The result? Reluctant chastity, bitterness, blows and sometimes murder, broken homes and twisted children — and furtive little passes degrading to woman and man. Is this Commandment ever obeyed? If a man swore on his own Bible that he refrained from coveting his neighbor's wife because the code forbade it, I would suspect either self-deception or subnormal sexuality. Any man virile enough to sire a child has coveted many women, whether he acts or not. "Now comes Mike and says: 'There is no need to covet my wife... love her! There's no limit to her love, we have everything to gain — and nothing to lose but fear and guilt and hatred and jealousy.' The proposition is incredible. So far as I recall only pre-civilization Eskimos were this naive — and they were so isolated that they were almost 'Men from Mars' themselves. But we gave them our 'virtues' and now they have chastity and adultery just like the rest of us."

"Eskimos were invariably described as the happiest people on Earth. Any unhappiness they suffered was not through jealousy; they didn't have a word for it. They borrowed spouses for convenience and fun — it did not make them unhappy. So who's looney? Look at this glum world around you, then tell me: Did Mike's disciples seem happier, or unhappier, than other people?" "I didn't talk to them all, Jubal. But — yes, they're happy. So happy they seem slap-happy. There's a catch in it somewhere." "Maybe you were the catch."

"You claim to love Jill... yet you won't give her the fair shake you give a crooked politician. Not a tenth the effort she made to help you when you were in trouble. Where would you be if she had made so feeble a try? Rotting in Hell, most likely. You're bitching about friendly fornication — do you know what I'm worried about?" "What?" "Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Sweat over that, instead!"

"Mike is like the first man to discover fire. Fire was there all along — after he showed them how, anybody could use it… anybody with sense enough not to get burned with it."

"Mike is our Prometheus — but that's all. Mike keeps emphazing this. Thou art God, I am God, he is God — all that groks. Mike is a man like the rest of us. A superior man admittedly — a lesser man taught the things the Martians know, might have set himself up as a pipsqueak god. Mike is above that temptation. Prometheus… but that is all."

"The ability to grok more of the universe than that piece you happen to be standing on at the moment. Mike has it from years of Martian discipline."

"My failures are so much more numerous than my successes that I am beginning to wonder if full grokking will show that I am on the wrong track entirely — that this race must be split up, hating each other, fighting each other, constantly unhappy and at war even with their own individual selves… simply to have that weeding out that every race must have."

"If one tenth of one percent of the population is capable of getting the news, then all you have to do is show them — and in a matter of some generations all the stupid ones will die out and those with your discipline will inherit the Earth. Whenever that is — a thousand years from now, or ten thousand — will be plenty soon enough to worry about whether some new hurdle is necessary to make them jump higher. But don't go getting faint-hearted because only a handful have turned into angels overnight. Personally, I never expected any of them to manage it."

"Man, as a social animal, can no more escape government than the individual can escape bondage to his bowels."

"Each sunrise is a precious jewel…for it may never be followed by its sunset."

"Is there more than one Berquist?" "Maybe not; he is something of a bastard."

"I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time — and then shut up."

"A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human 'wisdom'...and the other twenty percent isn't very important."

"Who said I was wise? I'm a professional bad example. You can learn a lot by watching me. Or listening to me. Either one."

"Kiss girls all you want to — it beats the hell out of card games."

""Audacity, always audacity" — soundest principle of strategy. In practicing medicine I learned that when you are most at loss is the time when you must appear confident. In law I had learned that, when your case seems hopeless, you must impress the jury with your relaxed certainty."

"I mean it. A confidence man knows he's lying; that limits his scope. But a successful shaman believes what he says — and belief is contagious; there is no limit to his scope. But I lacked the necessary confidence in my own infallibility; I could never become a prophet ... just a critic — a sort of fourth-rate prophet with delusions of gender."

"Thou art God. May you always drink deep May you never be thirsty."

"With water of life we grow closer."

"Our nest is yours."

"I give you the water of life."

"May you always drink deep."

"We grow ever closer."

"Share water. Never thirst."

"Grok in fullness."

"Nest. Water. Life."

"Waiting always fills."

"Secrecy begets tyranny."

"Aquafraternally yours,"

"The essence of the discipline is, first, self-awareness, then, self control."

"He had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days — since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other — with, of course, a day off each leap year for sheer solipsist debauchery. (UC)"

"Self awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together."

"There is no safety this side of the grave."

"God forgives necessity."

"The size of mammary glands is only a concern for infants. (and, I could add, for men or women who are temporarily or inappropriately thinking or acting like infants.)"

"The golden sunshine of Italy congealed into tears. Here's to the alcoholic brotherhood... much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort."

"Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code — family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy, ... restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, etcetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an "obscene" sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than the failure to abide by the code."

"...You know how Fair Witnesses behave." "Well . . . no, I don't. I've never had any dealings with Fair Witnesses." "So? Perhaps you weren't aware of it. Anne!" Anne was seated on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, "That new house on the far hilltop - can you see what color they've painted it?" Anne looked in the direction in which Jubal was pointing and answered, "It's white on this side." She did not inquire why Jubal had asked, nor make any comment. Jubal went on to Jill in normal tones. "You see? Anne is so thoroughly indoctrinated that it doesn't even occur to her to infer that the other side is probably white too. All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't force her to commit herself as to the far side . . . unless she herself went around to the other side and looked - and even then she wouldn't assume that it stayed whatever color it might be after she left . . . because they might repaint it as soon as she turned her back. "Anne is a Fair Witness?" "Graduate, unlimited license, and admitted to testify before the High Court. ..."

"Live each golden moment as if it were eternity — without fear, without hope, but with a sybaritic gusto."

"A Cabellesque satire on religion and sex."

"SISL was never censored by anyone in any fashion. The first draft was nearly twice as long as the published version. I cut it myself to bring it down to a commercial length. But I did not leave out anything of any importance; I simply trimmed all possible excess verbiage. Perhaps you have noticed that it reads 'fast' despite its length; that is why. … The original, longest version of SISL … is really not worth your trouble, as it is the same story throughout — simply not as well told. With it is the brushpenned version which shows exactly what was cut out — nothing worth reading, that is. I learned to write for pulp magazines, in which one was paid by the yard rather than by the package; it was not until I started writing for the Saturday Evening Post that I learned the virtue of brevity."

"Jubal... is a devout and fierce individualist in a world filled with cults and bureaucracies, and by novel’s end it is he, not Jill nor Mike, that is still a stranger, still tilting against the windmills. He honestly believes in his own free will, which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pandeistic urge, ‘Thou art God!’ Mike, by contrast, readily abandons his Martian beliefs for human ones, even as he claims to merely find a congress between them."