Clifford D. Simak Quotes
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Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.
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He sat and watched them come and he thought of going in to get a rifle, but he didn’t stir from his seat upon the steps. The rifle would do no good, he told himself. It would be a senseless thing to get it; more than that, a senseless attitude. The least that man could do, he thought, was to meet these creatures of another world with clean and empty hands.
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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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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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'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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'They’re just ordinary people,' Nancy said. 'You can’t expect too much of them.'
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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 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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'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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To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.
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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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These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.
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Beyond his own sure knowledge, he had not a shred of proof.
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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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Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it.
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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 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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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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'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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If there could only be more time, he thought. But, of course, there never was. There was not the time right now and there would never be. No matter how many centuries he might be able to devote, there'd always be so much more knowledge than he'd gathered at the moment that the little he had gathered would always seem a pittance.
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There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.
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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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He knew that there was death-that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.
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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.