Gordon R. Dickson

Quotes

1. Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst his books. For to you Kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned by the flicking of a finger...

   p. 153

2. 

   Plainly he was one of those rare people who burn with an inner fire—but the inner fire that never failed in James Arm-of-the-Lord was a brand of woe and a torch of terror to the Unrighteous. Nor was it lessened by the fact that the ranks of the Unrighteous, in James’ estimation, included all those whose opinions in any way differed from his own.

   p. 328

3. 

   “Exaggeration of confidence,” he said, “is a fault in people who don’t know their business.”

   p. 315

4. 

   “Good luck to you, too, sir.”

   “I make it a point not to know the lady,” said Cletus. “I can’t afford to count on her.”

   p. 349

5. 

   It’s a dirty, damn universe, and every once in a while I get a chance to hit back at it. That’s all. If I knew in the morning when I started out that I was going to be killed that day, I’d still go—because I couldn’t die happier than to go down hitting back.

   p. 334

6. 

   “You don’t quench ambition by feeding it any more than you quench a fire the same way,” said Cletus. “To an ambitious man, what he already has is nothing. It’s what he doesn’t have that counts.”

   p. 280

7. 

   The immediate teaching of philosophers may be gentle, but the theory behind their teaching is without compunction—and that’s why so much bloodshed and misery has always attended the paths of their followers, who claim to live by those teachings. More blood’s been spilled by the militant adherents of prophets of change than by any other group of people down through the history of man.

   p. 195

8. 

   In a climate of confusion, one of the surest ways of confounding the enemy is to tell him the plain truth.

   p. 36

9. 

   With the situation fully and correctly understood, it becomes entirely reasonable that the very small fraction of a second preceding a violent death could be a trigger to speculative thought.

   p. 67

10. 

    Actually, each generation likes to think of itself as at the pivot point in history, that in its time the great decision is made which puts man either on the true road or the false. But things aren’t really that serious. Truthfully, the way of mankind is too massive to be kinked, suddenly; it only changes direction in a long and gradual bend over many generations.

    p. 142

11. 

    “It’s not often I make mistakes,” he said. “Perhaps I can console myself with the thought that when I do they turn out to be on the same order of magnitude as my successes.”

    p. 411

12. 

    Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?

    p. 490