The Boat of a Million Years

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

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

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.

Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible.

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

“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?”

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Corruption rewards its favorites with jobs.

Who can make a medicine against time?

Nothing in excess, including self-denial.

What else is life but always bidding farewell?

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

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—

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

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