Clifford D. Simak Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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They would fail. We would always fail. We weren’t built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn’t change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we traveled.
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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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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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What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step from one world to another.
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Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.
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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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Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.