The Long Way Home

Quotes

1. For the ordinary man, instability—change—means dislocation, war, uncertainty, misery, and death.

   p. 198

2. 

   It isn’t possible to have equality. It’s been tried again and again in history, giving everybody a vote, and it’s always failed—always, in a few generations, the worse politicians drove out the better. Because by definition, half the people always have below-average intelligence; and the average is not high.

   p. 78

3. 

   It sounds rather silly, doesn’t it? One little man thinking he can change history all by his lonesome. A lot of trouble has been caused by that delusion.

   p. 219

4. 

   I am a peaceful man, captain. I rely more on my cerebral cortex than my guns.

   p. 160

5. 

   Do you think maybe I want power for myself? That’s for fools who want to command other fools.

   p. 57

6. 

   I was trying to avoid the cliché all too common in science fiction, even today, of a whole population feeling itself oppressed and waiting only for a leader to rise in a body against its overlords. No government for which that was actually the case could last a minute. There must always be a majority who have some stake in things as they are, whether that stake consist of wealth and power or simply of law, order, and predictability. Moreover, most people cannot really imagine any system working which is very different from the one they are used to. Hence they find rationalizations for it. Even slaves often do this.

7. 

   Chanthavar said that the Egyptian pyramids, part of the Sphinx, traces of buried cities, a couple of ruined dams in America and Russia, some hydrogen-bomb craters, were still around, otherwise nothing earlier than the Thirty-fifth century. Time went on, relentlessly, and one by one the proud works of man were lost.

   p. 75

That’s all the quotes.

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