The Long Tomorrow

Quotes

1. “Was he trying to frighten you?”

   “I don’t think so,” said Len. “I think he was just telling me the truth.”

2. 

   I have let it blow through me, and it is just a wind. I have let the words sound in my ears, and they are nothing but words, spoken by an ignorant man with a dusty beard. They do not stir me, they do not touch me. I am done with them, too.

   I know now what lies across the land, the slow and heavy weight. They call it faith, but it is not faith. It is fear. The people have clapped a shelter over their heads, a necessity of ignorance, a passion of retreat, and they have called it God, and worshiped it.

3. 

   “Hell, how do you think the human race ever learned anything, except by trial and error?”

   “But it all takes such a long, long time,” said Len.”

   “Everything takes a long time. Birthing takes nine months, and dying takes you all the rest of your life, and what are you complaining about, anyway?”

4. 

   “I thought they knew,” Len said. “I thought they were sure of it.”

   “Research isn’t done that way.”

   “But how can they spend all that time, and maybe that much more again, if they know it might be all for nothing?”

   “Because how would they know if they didn’t try? And because there isn’t any other way to do it.”

5. 

   “Will it always stay like this?”

   “Nothing,” said Hostetter, “ever stays always like anything.”

6. 

   He could hear Pa’s voice saying, “A man’s religion, his sect, is his own affair. But those people have no religion or sect. They’re a mob, with a mob’s fear and cruelty, and with half-crazy, cunning men stirring them up against others.”

7. 

   You can’t destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.

8. 

   I am finished with running. Now I will stop and choose my way.

   Sooner or later a man has to stop and choose his way, not out of the ways he would like there to be, or the ways there ought to be, but out of the ways there are.

9. 

   “Why did they do it?” he asked.

   “Because they’re afraid.”

   “Of what?”

   “Of yesterday,” said Mr. Hostetter. “Of tomorrow.”

10. 

    But for today, yesterday, tomorrow, it is not important. Time goes on without any of us. Only a belief, a state of mind, endures, and even that changes constantly, but underneath there are two main kinds—the one that says, Here you must stop knowing, and the other which says, Learn.

    Right or wrong, the fruit was eaten, and there can’t ever be a going back.

    I have made my choice.

11. 

    Knowledge is not like sin. There is no mystical escape from it.

12. 

    No matter which way I go I know now that I will never have peace.

    For peace is certainty, and there is no certainty but death.

13. 

    “I grew up with the idea of it,” said Hostetter. “Nobody ever taught me that it was evil or forbidden, or that God had put a curse on it, and that’s the difference.”

14. 

    “I guess we’ve got a lot to learn.”

    “Quite a lot,” said Hostetter thoughtfully. “It won’t be easy, either. So many things will jar against every belief you’ve grown up with, and I don’t care how you scoff at it, some of it sticks to you.”

15. 

    There’s never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn’t think he was fully justified. That’s a mental trick called rationalizing, and it’s done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.

That’s all the quotes.

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