Clifford D. Simak

Quotes

1. 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.

   p. 120

2. 

   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?

   p. 70

3. 

   “It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton.

   “That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”

   p. 220

4. 

   “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.”

   p. 215

5. 

   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.

   p. 201

6. 

   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.

   p. 75

7. 

   They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.

   p. 14

8. 

   And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart.

   p. 195

9. 

   “It’s a wonder to me,” said Adams sourly, “that you don’t simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.”

   p. 134

10. 

    And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him and he felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and sureness of it.

    p. 139

11. 

    As he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.

    p. 99

12. 

    “You do not belong to any bona fide religion that prohibits killing?”

    “I presume I could classify myself as a Christian,” said Sutton. “I believe there is a Commandment about killing.”

    The robot shook his head. “It doesn’t count.”

    “It is clear and specific,” Sutton argued. “It says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

    “It is all of that,” the robot told him. “But it has been discredited. You humans discredited it yourselves. You never obeyed it. You either obey a law or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.”

    p. 27