Clifford D. Simak Quotes
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They’d lived all their life on Earth; they knew nothing but the Earth. They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was not really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary.
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What is a bow and arrow?It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war.It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering.It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.It is a symbol of a way of life.
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What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?
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'They changed,' said Enid, 'from corporeal beings, from biological beings, to incorporeal beings, immaterial, pure intelligences. They now are ranged in huge communities on crystal lattices...'
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Individualists would have little use for a device which would make them understand one another, for they would not care whether they understood one another.
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I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.
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'Anita,' he asked, 'are there really werewolves?''Yes,' she told him. 'Your werewolves are down there.'And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world.
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Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.
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The people finally know. They've been told about the mutants. And they hated the mutants. Of course, they hated them. They hated them because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people.
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The past, he said. The past is too much with me. And the past has made me useless. I have too much to remember-so much to remember that it becomes more important than the things there are to do. I’m living in the past and that is no way to live.
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'We're very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism keeps it that way.' 'No, I hadn't known,' said Boone. 'Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.'
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'It wouldn’t be the truth,' said Sutton.'That,' said Trevor, 'doesn’t have a thing to do with it.'
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Beyond his own sure knowledge, he had not a shred of proof.
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Boone gulped and swallowed. He spoke to The Hat. 'You said the Highway to Eternity?' That is not what I said. I said the Highway of Eternity.'Small difference,' Boone told him. Not so small as you might think.
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The party was beginning to get noisy-not boisterous, but noisy. It was beginning to acquire that stale air of futility to which, in the end, all parties must fall victim.
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'Propaganda,' Trevor said. 'Let’s call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself.'
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I’m just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly.
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These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.
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They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.
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The old and the young, he thought. The old, who do not care; the young, who do not think.
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The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.
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It was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than as a person.
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There have been moments when I also wasn’t able to attach as much importance to football as it seemed to me I should.
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Accident, he wondered, or a way of hiding? Trapped or planned? He had no way of knowing and further speculation was ridiculous, based as it necessarily must be upon earlier assumptions that were entirely without support.