Science Fiction Authors

"I don't have to be a hero, he thought in silent wonder. All I have to do is pretend."

"A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world--something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear--is nothing but a cheap hustle."

"Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be."

"The problem with happy endings," Tan'elkoth said, "is that nothing is ever truly over."

"I respect what is repectable," Tan'elkoth replied. "To ask for respect where none has been earned is childish maundering.And what is repectable, in the end, save service? Even your idol Jefferson is, in the end, measured by how well he served the species. The prize of individualism--its goal--is self-actualization, which is only another name for vanity. We do not admire men for achieving self-actualization; we admire self-actualization when its end result is a boon to humanity."

"Don't care about gods. Gods are irrelevant. What counts is people. What counts is having respect for each other."

"Can't trust a fascist--truth is always your first sacrifice to the welfare of the state"

"A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization."

"I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step."

"When the gods would punish us, they answer our prayers."

"It's customary, at times like this, to say a few words. A man shouldn't die with no understanding of why he's been murdered. I do not pride myself on my eloquence, and so I will keep this simple."

"Fairy tales--simple stories for simple minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life."

"Here was the weapon of a hero. A real hero. Not a playactor. Not a pretend-hero, like Ganner had always been. But this weapon was now in Ganner's hand."

"The feeling he'd had, that he was about to get himself killed, swelled into an overwhelming premonition of doom. Ganner's knees went weak, and a very large part of him wanted to bolt down the corridor and get away-but though he hadn't been much of a hero, the one virtue he'd never had to fake was courage."

"I guess heroes feel like they've accomplished something." "And you haven't? Several thousand slaves might disagree."

"You can kill me, but you can't make me obey."

"A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth."

"Shit, kid, thinking about that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, like I just ate a kitten."

"And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of "living life honestly," she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special."

"The capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent. Talent exists to be used. We do not ask sheep to be wolves; we, the wolves, do not ask ourselves to be sheep. Sheep can make such rules as happen to suit them--but it's foolishly naive to expect wolves to obey.""

"We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer."

"He had no idea what he should do now. Without destiny to guide him, he was lost in a vast, whistling darkness. Any direction he might choose was purely abitary; it would make no more sense, offer no more hope, than would sitting still. Which offered neither sense nor hope at all."

"His destiny had betrayed him, had made him a destroyer on a scale that humbled even Caine. Destiny, he understood with bitter certainty, could not be trusted."

"Only human, after all."

"Caine was no longer the icon of evil, the Enemy of God, the author of all the world's ills. He had become simply what he was: a ruthless, amoral man, now beaten--crushed by the world, just like any other."

"...I suspect that pain means little to you as your life--but both your life and your pain are very important to me."

"Reasons are for peasants."

"The man did not move because only immobility could hurt more than motion: the man held himself still because to move might lessen his suffering, and that he could not bear. For him only pain had meaning."

"He did understand. Finally, fatally, he did. He had thought he was the master of history, that his fractal world-tree had grown according to his will. He had allowed himself to be deceived."

"All true stories end in death."

"Maybe. A powerful. Enough. Metaphor. Grows. Its own. Truth."

"Consider the history of the earth. Let the height of the Empire State Building represent the planet’s five billion years of existence. Man's one-million-year tenure on earth can then be represented by a one-foot ruler, standing at the very top of the building. A dime placed at the top of the ruler represents the entire span of man's civilization. And, at the very top of the whole wobbly conglomerate, is glued a postage stamp —this represents the length of time since man has developed modern science."

"I think it's perfectly OK to exploit the moon. Largely for two reasons: there's no life there, and it is close enough and rich enough in resources to be economically useful to Earth. In the final analysis, everything we do in space, if it does not help the people of Earth, all the people, it's not going to happen."

"My first published novel was written for teenagers, and there were rules laid down by the publisher: no sex, no smoking, no swearing. I blew up entire solar systems, I consigned billions of people to horrible death; they didn't seem to mind that at all. But no hanky-panky."

"Even snaky little Vyborg chatted happily with a few of the glowing-eyed young women that clustered about him, Eberly noted. Power goes to some people’s heads; in other people, power goes straight to the groin."

"“Wake up in there!” Fritz hollered. “I’m awake,” said Gaeta. “These days you spend too much time in bed and not enough time sleeping.”"

"He’s so doggone narrow-minded he could look through a keyhole with both eyes."

"“A teacher?” Vyborg gasped. “They got rid of him in Mexico because he was teaching unauthorized garbage. Do you want him teaching his blasphemies here?” Berkowitz’s smile diminished by less than a millimeter. “Freedom of thought is not blasphemous, Sammi. He’s a great teacher.”"

"“The real problem,” Eberly burst out, “is that these regulations were written by people who live in a world that must be tightly controlled. They all share the same basic, underlying view that society must be hierarchical and controlled from the top.” Wilmot felt pleased that the discussion was moving into his field of interest. “Aren’t all societies controlled from the top? Even so-called democracies are ruled by a small elite group; the only difference is that a democracy can shift its elite without bloodshed and give the general populace the illusion that they have made a telling change.”"

"Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to get the other poor sonofabitch to die for his country."

"If astronomy has taught man anything it is the painful fact that we are not special creatures in any sense of the term. Our star is an average one, and the conditions that led to the formation of our planet and ourselves were probably not very extraordinary."

"The plans and schemes of tyrants are broken by many things. They shatter against cliffs of heroic struggle. They rupture on reefs of open resistance. And they are slowly eroded, bit by little bit, on the very beaches where they measure triumph, by countless grains of sand. By the stubborn little decencies of humble little men."

"Papa always says there’s room for everyone, but some people certainly take theirs up without making it interesting."

"One of the stranger beliefs in science fiction is a passionate belief in Beautiful Writing--lots and lots of extraspecial exciting words thrown no hurled no CASCADED upon the reader in a shimmering shower of precious verbal gleaming gleanings and a singing pillar of righteous fiery syntactic spinach. The only thing that was good in that sentence was the spinach, and the hell with it."

"Human beings always say they prefer peace, but it takes a saint to talk us into not assaulting our neighbors."

"There is a saying among those of us who have careers with the Council of Humanity that skiers, cooks, painters, and diplomats must work with what is in front of them."

"In discussing the existence, or not, of the soul: "I am Caledon. Quite a few of my fellow Caledons still believe there is some essence to a human being, something that makes a person unique." "And you don't." "I don't. I see that people who believe in anything beyond plain physical reality are mainly engaged in making themselves or others miserable.""

"If you want to learn a culture, you have to learn how to like what it likes, rather than go looking for something that you like."

"Shan had always said that in any multiple choice about human motivation, the real answer was always "all of the above.""

"And just like this, all of a sudden, your people and mine will begin to talk?" "It only looks sudden from some places. Running off a cliff is sudden if you don't know it's there, even if you have been running toward it for days." "That's not a reassuring metaphor." "It isn't meant to be."