# Quote — Clifford D. Simak, Time is the Simplest Thing

> They were the misfits of the world, the outcasts, for they deviated from the norm of humanity as established through all of history. Yet it was this very deviation which made them the hope of all mankind. Ordinary human beings—the kind of human beings who had brought the race this far—were not enough today. The ordinary humans had pushed the culture forward as far as they could push it. It had served its purpose; it had brought the ordinary human as far as he could go. Now the race evolved. Now new abilities had awoke and grown—exactly as the creatures of the Earth had evolved and specialized and then evolved again from that first moment when the first feeble spark of life had come into being in the seething chemical bath of a new and madcap planet.
>
> Twisted brains, the normal people called them; magic people, dwellers of the darkness—and could anyone say no to this? For each people set its standards for each generation and these standards and these norms were not set by any universal rule, by no all-encompassing yardstick, but by what amounted to majority agreement, with the choice arrived at through all the prejudice and bias, all the faulty thinking and the unstable logic to which all intelligence is prone.

- Author: [Clifford D. Simak](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak.md)
- Book: [Time is the Simplest Thing](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/time-is-the-simplest-thing.md)
- Page: 233
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clifford_D._Simak#Time_is_the_Simplest_Thing_(1961)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/time-is-the-simplest-thing/they-were-the

## More from this book

> This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it—and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, any dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and the viewpoint of men who’d long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life—life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased.

p. 87 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/time-is-the-simplest-thing/this-was-the.md)

> The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?
>
> For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.

p. 206 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/time-is-the-simplest-thing/the-red-thought.md)

> There were certain basic things, perhaps—the very earth, itself—which existed through every point in time, holding a sort of limited eternity to provide a solid matrix. And the dead—the dead and fabricated—stayed in the past as ghosts. The fence posts and the wire strung on them, the dead trees, the farm buildings, and the bridge were shadows of the present persisting in the past. Persisting, perhaps, reluctantly, because since they had no life they could not move along. They were bound in time and stretched through time and they were long, long shadows.
>
> He was, he realized with a shock, the only living thing existing in this moment on this earth. He and nothing else.

p. 87 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/clifford-d-simak/time-is-the-simplest-thing/there-were-certain.md)