The Boat of a Million Years

Quotes

1. It would annoy me less that we’re heading into a new puritanical era if the puritanism concerned itself about things that matter.

   p. 330

2. 

   Are you happy?

   Your question is meaningless. I am occupied. I participate in operations, I am one with the accomplishments.

   p. 426

3. 

   I have learned much in two thousand years, but nothing about any gods, except that they too, arise, change, age, and die. Whatever there is beyond the universe, if anything, I doubt it concerns itself with us.

   p. 140

4. 

   I also know you cannot pick and choose. Change is a medicine bundle. You must refuse it altogether, or take the whole thing.

   p. 215

5. 

   Think. You have had your dealings with our bureaucracy. It is impossible not to, especially if one is a foreigner. Believe me, when we set our minds to it we can tangle, obstruct, and bring to a dead halt a herd of stampeding elephants.

   p. 291

6. 

   “Well, I’ll try to sketch it out for you, but I’ll have to repeat stuff I’ve told you before.”

   “That’s all right. I’m a simon-pure layman. My basic thought habits were formed early in the Iron Age. Where it comes to science, I can use plenty of repetition.”

   p. 331

7. 

   I’ve seen so many gods come and go, what’s one more?

   p. 254

8. 

   Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible.

   p. 426

9. 

   “Evolution is cut-and-try. If I may anthropomorphize,” he added. “Often it’s hard not to.”

   p. 333

10. 

    “We do need something to lift us out of ourselves. It’s wrong to carry our pettinesses along to the stars.”

    “We will, though,” he said. “We can’t help it. How do you escape being what you are?”

    p. 438

11. 

    Before the spirit could seek into it, the mind must. She studied the tensor equations as once she studied the sutras, she meditated upon the koans of science, and at last she began to feel her oneness with all that was, and in the vision find peace.

    p. 449

12. 

    We Russians have learned to fear anarchy above all else. We would rather have tyranny than it. Hanno, you do wrong to look on people’s republics, strong governments of every kind, as always evil. Freedom is perhaps better, but chaos is worse.

    p. 396

13. 

    You shall depart freely. Caution enjoins me to have you arrested and garroted within this hour. Either you are a charlatan and deserve it or a mortal danger and require it. However, I deem you a sensible man who will withdraw to his obscurity. And I am grateful to you for a fascinating glimpse of—what is best left alone.

    p. 205

14. 

    Well, everybody got stupid now and then, especially in war.

    p. 306

15. 

    I seek occasional relief in old books. They help me tell the transient from the enduring.

    p. 291

16. 

    No amount of money would stave off a nuclear warhead.

    p. 328

17. 

    I never set myself up as a prophet. Those crazy preachers have been the death of thousands, and the end is not yet.

    p. 254

18. 

    “‘Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Yeah, trouble is, the three classes of people aren’t the same.”

    p. 336

19. 

    If you continue a liar, you are as skillful a one as I have found in a wide experience.

    p. 198

20. 

    What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little?

    p. 482

21. 

    The universe held as many surprises as it did stars. No, more. That was its glory. But someday one of them was bound to kill you.

    p. 517

22. 

    She seldom bothered taking revenge. Time did that for her, eventually.

    p. 281

23. 

    “Is that all he wants?” McCready wondered. “Shuffling papers in an office, forever?”

    p. 298

24. 

    Something as biologically fundamental as death ought to be in the very fabric of evolution virtually from the beginning.

    p. 332

25. 

    Once this was a free country. Oh, I always knew that couldn’t last, that here too things were bound to grind back to the norm—masters and serfs, whatever names they go by. And so far we continue happier than most of the world ever was. But damn, modern democracy has the technology to regiment us beyond anything Caesar, Torquemada, Suleyman, or Louis XIV dared dream of.

    p. 327

26. 

    I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.

    p. 441

27. 

    “Your Eminence is as great a man as I have ever met.”

    “Then God have mercy on humankind,” Richelieu replied.

    p. 207

28. 

    Corruption rewards its favorites with jobs.

    p. 297

29. 

    Who can make a medicine against time?

    p. 216

30. 

    “He says giants built it in the morning of the world,” Hanno told Pytheas.

    “Then his people are as ignorant as we,” the Greek said low.

    p. 11

31. 

    Nothing in excess, including self-denial.

    p. 29

32. 

    We can hardly expect conventional respectability of a person whose goal in life is enlightenment.

    p. 27

33. 

    What else is life but always bidding farewell?

    p. 21

34. 

    That is forgotten, their wars and their deeds and their very speech. Wisdom lasts. It is what I have sought across the world.

    p. 102

35. 

    I heard too many answers, I met too many gods. Abroad they call on Christ, but if you fare southward long enough it is Muhammad; and eastward it is Gautama Buddha, save where they say the world is a dream of Brahm, or offer to a host of gods and ghosts and elves like ours in these Northlands. And almost every man I asked told me that his folk know the truth while the rest are benighted. Could I but hear a word I felt even half sure of—

    p. 103

36. 

    He had intended to say that such was the nature of power. Seizing it and holding it were alike filthy.

    p. 106

37. 

    He did not share the widespread present-day faith in astrology. It seemed likeliest to him that sheer accident ruled the world.

    p. 45

That’s all the quotes.

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