Edgar Pangborn

Quotes

1. Human beings have never been very adult about cleaning up after themselves.

   p. 75

2. 

   I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love.

   p. 15

3. 

   In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it.

   p. 64

4. 

   A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves.

   p. 64

5. 

   Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble.

   p. 38

6. 

   I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers—who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem?

   p. 133

7. 

   They never seemed to want to teach her anything except how to be like everybody else. When she finished—bright, you know, nothing stupid about Clara—she could add a column of figures after a fashion, read a little if she had to. Hated books, still does. Always been a heavy reader myself, be lost nowadays if I wasn’t. Damned if I know what she did learn. Self-expression before she could have anything to express. Social consciousness, whatever that is, when even now she hasn’t enough command of language to tell you what she thinks society is. Scraps of this and that, no logic to hold ’em together. Everything made easy—and how are you going to make education easy? You might as well try to build an athlete by keeping him in a hammock with cream puffs and beer.

   p. 38

8. 

   You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it.

   p. 147

9. 

   “You have to fight back. Can’t afford not to, with your intelligence. People hate intelligence, didn’t you know?”

   “Depends on what it does to ’em, doesn’t it?”

   “Not so much, Angelo. Dream up a new gadget, they’ll be grateful for a while,” said Feuermann’s voice. “It’ll be only the gadget they love, not the brain that made it—that they fear. They may have enough superstitious dread to worship it—devil-worship—but never will they respect it except superstitiously.”

   p. 80

10. 

    “And where is your guarantee against war in that, Miles?”

    “There can’t be any except in human ethical maturity. A sensible political structure would help enormously, but there’s going to be risk of war so long as men think they can justify hating strangers and grabbing for power. Human hearts and minds are basic—the rest is mechanics.”

    p. 53

11. 

    In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl.

    p. 53

12. 

    One doesn’t look for the small promises of an ethical revolution in the headlines: the ocean’s currents do not derive from the ocean’s tempests.

    p. 34