The Black Cloud

Quotes

1. Losing power, utterly and completely, is the most dreadful prospect that a politician can think of. It overshadows everything else.

   p. 167

2. 

   “By and large, conventional religion, as many humans accept it, is illogical in its attempt to conceive of entities lying outside the Universe. Since the Universe comprises everything, it is evident that nothing can lie outside it. The idea of a ‘god’ creating the Universe is a mechanistic absurdity clearly derived from the making of machines by men. I take it that we are in agreement about all this.”

   p. 177

3. 

   It’s only too easy to read your own state of mind into what other people say.

   p. 168

4. 

   Lives loss through an ‘act of God’ are regretted, perhaps deeply regretted, but they do not arouse our wildest passions. It is otherwise with lives that are forfeited through deliberate human agency. The word ‘deliberate’ is important here. One deliberate murder can produce a sharper reaction than ten thousand deaths on the roads.

   p. 173

5. 

   “You haven’t very much respect for my profession, have you, Professor Kingsley?”

   “Since it is you who wish for frankness, I will tell you that I have not. I regard politicians rather as I regard the instruments on the dashboard of my car. They tell me what is going on in the engine of state, but they don’t control it.”

   p. 70

6. 

   “But I can’t go along and gatecrash.”

   “Nonsense, of course you can come—a guest from England! You’ll be the lion of the party. Probably half a dozen film moguls from Hollywood will want to sign you up on the spot.”

   “All the more reason for not going,” said Kingsley.

   p. 53

7. 

   “Now do you see my point?”

   “I’m beginning to see through a glass darkly. You mean that the mental make-up of a leading politician is likely to be such that he couldn’t dream it possible that anyone could find the prospect of becoming a dictator wholly unpalatable.”

   “Yes, I can see it all, Chris,” Leicester grinned. “Graft everywhere, executions just for the laughs, no wife or daughter safe.”

   p. 167

8. 

   I will say this for you, Chris. I never knew anyone who was better at finding work for other people.

   p. 146

9. 

   The policy was to keep everything in watertight compartments. In the interests of security, they said, but more likely in the interests of inefficiency.

   p. 84

10. 

    “I’m still waiting to hear how I should have compromised. Are you sure that ‘compromise’ and ‘capitulate’ are not synonymous in your vocabulary?”

    p. 69

11. 

    It isn’t the Universe that’s following our logic, it’s we that are constructed in accordance with the logic of the Universe. And that gives what I might call a definition of intelligent life: something that reflects the basic structure of the Universe.

    p. 158

12. 

    Once the spark was struck the story would spread like wildfire, and would be in the papers in next to no time. The Director had never had any cause to think highly of newspaper reporters, particularly of their scientific accuracy.

    p. 24

13. 

    Before anyone starts criticising, let me say that I know it’s a preposterous idea and I wouldn’t suggest it for a moment if the alternative weren’t even more outrageously preposterous.

    p. 131

14. 

    Viewed from a wholly logical point of view the bearing and rearing of children is a thoroughly unattractive proposition. To a woman it means pain and endless worry. To a man it means extra work extending over many years to support his family. So, if we were wholly logical about sex, we should probably not bother to reproduce at all. Nature takes care of this by making us utterly and wholly irrational.

    p. 154

15. 

    The two men were mentally too dissimilar for more than a half hour of conversation between them to be possible.

    p. 65

16. 

    “Not everyone views the government with quite the same disrespect that you do.”

    “No, more’s the pity.”

    p. 71

17. 

    Ifs and buts are the stuff of politics, Mr. Parkinson. As a scientist I am concerned with facts not with motives, suspicions, and airy-fairy nothingness.

    p. 70

That’s all the quotes.

17 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more