Extraterrestrial Life In Media

"It starts with a single individual—always a child—and then spreads explosively, like the formation of crystals round the first nucleus in a saturated solution. Adults will not be affected, for their minds are already set in an unalterable mould."

"We believe—it is only a theory—that the Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere. When it knew that you were almost ready, it sent us here to do its bidding, to prepare you for the transformation that is now at hand."

"All these potentialities, all these latent powers—we do not possess them, nor do we understand them. Our intellects are far more powerful than yours, but there is something in your minds that has always eluded us."

"Your mystics, though they were lost in their own delusions, had seen part of the truth. There are powers of the mind, and powers beyond the mind, which your science could never have brought within its framework without shattering it entirely. [...] During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora's box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars."

"Across that abyss, there is only one bridge. Few races, unaided, have ever found it. Some have turned back while there was still time, avoiding both the danger and the achievement. Their worlds have become Elysian islands of effortless content, playing no further part in the story of the universe. That would never have been your fate—or your fortune. Your race was too vital for that. It would have plunged into ruin and taken others with it, for you would never have found the bridge."

"A century ago we came to your world and saved you from self-destruction. I do not believe that anyone would deny that fact—but what that self-destruction was, you never guessed."

"Far, far away on the horizon was something that was not of Earth—a line of misty columns, tapering slightly as they soared out of the sea and lost themselves among the clouds. They were spaced with perfect precision along the rim of the planet—too huge to be artificial, yet too regular to be natural. ("Sideneus 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn," said Rashaverak, and there was awe in his voice. "He has reached the center of the Universe." "And he has barely begun his journey," answered Karellen.)"

"Few artists thrive in solitude, and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests."

"“I've invented a new definition for TV,” he muttered gloomily. “I've decided it’s a device for hindering communication between artist and audience.”"

"The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest --and the greatest alarm. There was the team working on "total identification." The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then cinerama, had made the old "moving pictures" more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience and became part of the action. to achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become --for a while, at least-- any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the "program" was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life --indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself."

"It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of autumn."

"What finally decided him was the thought that, if he neglected this incredible opportunity, he would never forgive himself. All the rest of his life would be spent in vain regrets—and nothing could be worse than that."

"A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom."

"The evidence is confused with mysticism—perhaps the prime aberration of the human mind."

"The instrument he handed over on permanent loan to the World History Foundation was nothing more than a television receiver with an elaborate set of controls for determining co-ordinates in time and space. [...] One had merely to adjust the controls, and a window into the past was opened up. Almost the whole of human history for the past five thousand years became accessible in an instant. [...] Within a few days, all mankind's multitudinous messiahs had lost their divinity. Beneath the fierce passionless light of truth, faiths that had sustained millions for twice a thousand years vanished like morning dew. All the good and all the evil they had wrought were swept suddenly into the past, and could touch the minds of men no more. Humanity had lost its ancient gods: now it was old enough to have no need for new ones."

"Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth."

"Crime had practically vanished. It had become unnecessary and impossible. When no one lacks anything there is no point in stealing."

"All political problems," Karellen had once told Stormgren, "can be solved by the correct application of power"

"Fifty years is ample time to change the world and it's people almost beyond recognition. All that I'd required for the task are a sound knowledge of social engineering, a clear sight of the intended goal- and power"

"It was a tribute to the Overlords' psychology, and to their careful years of preparation, that only a few people fainted. Yet there could have been fewer still, anywhere in the world, who did not feel the ancient terror brush for one awful instant against their minds before reason banished it forever. There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail—all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body, and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm."

"Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded."

"If you want a single proof of the essential—how shall I put it—benevolence of the Overlords, think of that cruelty-to-animals order which they made within a month of their arrival. If I had had any doubts about Karellen before, that banished them!"

"Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets."

"When this book was written in the early 1950s, I was still quite impressed by the evidence for what is generally called the paranormal, and used it as a main theme of the story. Four decades later, after spending some millions of dollars of Yorkshire Television’s money researching my Mysterious World and Strange Powers programmes, I am an almost total skeptic. I have seen far too many claims dissolve into thin air, far too many demonstrations exposed as fakes."

"He had lost his race. And he knew that he had lost it, not by the few weeks or months that he had feared, but by millennia. The huge and silent shadows driving across the stars, more miles above his head than he dared to guess, were as far beyond his little "Columbus" as it surpassed the log canoes of paleolithic man. [...] All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now: only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Reinhold's brain: The human race was no longer alone."

"The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author."

"There was nothing left of Earth: They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun. Six thousand million kilometers beyond the orbit of Pluto, Karellen sat before a suddenly darkened screen. [...] The weight of centuries was upon him, and a sadness that no logic could dispel."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy — in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other."

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."

"A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws. You are almost entirely free of this prevalent evil."

"We're not trying to bring people to God; that's a contradiction in terms, you can't even say it in Martian. We're not trying to save souls, because souls can't be lost. We're not trying to get people to have faith, because what we offer is not faith but truth — truth they can check; we don't urge them to believe it. Truth for practical purposes, for here-and-now, truth as matter of fact as an ironing board and as useful as a loaf of bread… so practical that it can make war and hunger and violence and hate as unnecessary as…. as — well, as clothes here in the Nest. But they have to learn Martian first. That's the only hitch — finding people who are honest enough to believe what they see, and then are willing to do the hard work — it is hard work — of learning the language it can be taught in. A composer couldn't possibly write down a symphony in English… and this sort of symphony can't be stated in English any more than Beethoven's Fifth can be."

"His idea is that whenever you encounter any other grokking thing — he didn't say 'grokking' at this stage — any other living thing, man, woman, or stray cat… you are simply encountering your 'other end'… and the universe is just a little thing we whipped up among us the other night for our entertainment and then agreed to forget the gag. He put it in a much more sugar-coated fashion, being extremely careful not to tread on competitors' toes."

"Patricia's nature was an endless wish to make other people as happy as she was."

"Patricia Paiwonski gave Ben Caxton the all-out kiss of brotherhood before he knew what hit him."

"Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art. But it's up to the artist to use the language that can be understood. Most of these jokers don't want to use the language you and I can learn; they would rather sneer because we 'fail' to see what they're driving at. If anything. Obscurity is the refuge of the incompetent."

"Jubal, why isn't there stuff like this around where a person can see it?" "Because the world has gone nutty and contemporary art always paints the spirit of its times. Rodin died about the time the world started flipping its lid. His successors noted the amazing things he had done with light and shadow and mass and composition and they copied that part. What they failed to see was that the master told stories that laid bare the human heart. They became contemptuous of painting or sculpture that told a stories — they dubbed such work 'literary.' They went all out for abstractions. Jubal shrugged. "Abstract design is all right — for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience. These laddies who won't deign to do that — or can't — lost the public."

"Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up, Ben; she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She's a father going down to a dull office job while cancer is painfully eating away his insides, so as to bring home one more pay check for the kids. She's a twelve-year-old girl trying to mother her baby brothers and sisters because Mama had to go to Heaven. She's a switchboard operator sticking to her job while smoke is choking her and the fire is cutting off her escape. She's all the unsung heroes who couldn't quite cut it but never quit."