Fredric Brown

Quotes

1. I want men who, like you, would not take orders even if I should give them. I do not want to be a god, Crag, even though I have some powers beyond mankind’s; I would not let my new world be colonized by people who might even be tempted to obey me.

   p. 406

2. 

   Strangely, he wasn’t scared at all. He was even more coldly calm, calmly analytical. And he knew that he would have to be if he was to stand a chance to win this war. If he was to win it, his mind would have to be his major weapon; firearms might win a battle, but never the war.

   p. 555

3. 

   It was not the fashion for politicians who aspired to elective office to live ostentatiously, no matter how much money they had. If they loved luxury—and most of them did—they indulged that love in ways less publicly obvious than by living in mansions. The public believes what it thinks it sees.

   p. 364

4. 

   “Are you interested in science?”

   “Of course I am. Who isn’t?”

   p. 520

5. 

   The cat didn’t answer, except possibly by not answering.

   p. 534

6. 

   Her life, except for reading, had been dull—but it had not been in vain.

   p. 570

7. 

   “But do you believe they really teleported?”

   “I do. For instance, the guru with whom I spent time, under whom I studied this summer in Tibet, tells me he is certain that he has teleported twice. He is an honest man.”

   “Let’s grant that. Tell me why you think he isn’t a mistaken one.”

   p. 227

8. 

   I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind.

   p. 233

9. 

   I wish that I could believe not in mortality but in reincarnation or individual immortality; I wish that I could be living again in another body or, God help me, even watching from the edge of a fleecy cloud in Heaven or out through the dirty windowpane of a haunted house or through the dull eyes of a dung beetle or on any terms. On any terms I want to be watching, I want to be there, I want to be around, when we reach the stars, when we take over the universe and the universes, when we become the God in whom I do not believe as yet because I do not believe he exists as yet nor will exist until we become Him.

   p. 242

10. 

    Still sitting there, still looking up in the tree.

    At something that isn’t there? Luke wondered.

    Or at something that isn’t there for me but is there for him, and which of us is right?

    And he thinks that I don’t exist and I think I do, and which of us is right about that?

    Well, I am, on that point if no other. I think, therefore I am.

    But how do I know he’s there?

    Why couldn’t he be a figment of my imagination?

    Silly solipsism, the type of wondering just about everybody goes through sometime during adolescence, and then recovers from.

    But it gives to wonder all over again when you and other people start seeing things differently or start seeing different things.

    p. 324

11. 

    Bad, I thought, looking around me, that I’d accumulated so much. A man should never own more stuff than he can carry in his hands at a dead run. It was bad, but it had happened.

    p. 230

12. 

    A lot of my childhood playmates ended up behind bars and I don’t mean as bartenders.

    p. 214