There Will Be Time

Quotes

1. Above everything else, perhaps, was today’s concept of working together. I don’t mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that “togetherness,” be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and maintains well-developed channels to carry all ideas to the leadership and back again.

   p. 155

2. 

   Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who’d been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis’s purposes, he’d never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infallibility.

   p. 165

3. 

   I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder.

   p. 176

4. 

   Silence fell. The clock on my mantel ticked aloud and the wind outside flowed past like a river.

   p. 175

5. 

   Did ignorance save his freedom, or merely his illusion of freedom?

   p. 130

6. 

   Be calm. A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.

   p. 126

7. 

   “Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”

   “Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fail in the end—disastrously—but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!”

   p. 119

8. 

   Mortal combat corrupts, and war corrupts absolutely.

   p. 107

9. 

   The old man murmured: “Aye, we draw to an end. Dying hurts. Nonetheless the forefathers were wise who in their myths made Nan coequal with Lesu. A thing which endured forever would become unendurable. Death opens a way, for peoples as well as for people.”

   p. 124

10. 

    Don’t get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They’re the salt of the earth. It’s simply that I want other condiments too.

    p. 10

11. 

    The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.”

    p. 60

12. 

    “I really liked that girl.”

    “Not loved, evidently,” I observed.

    “N-n-no. I supposed not. Though what is love, anyway? Doesn’t it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and mutations and quantum jumps that— Never mind.”

    p. 83

13. 

    A cultured, sensitive, observant man is a pleasure to be with in any age.

    p. 97

14. 

    His conscience must have gotten tired of nagging him and delivered an ultimatum.

    p. 104

15. 

    As related, the bank was one of those eastern ones, with Roman pillars and cathedral dimness and, I suspect, a piece of Plymouth Rock in a reliquary.

    p. 52

16. 

    “Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce...Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring...

    I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill...never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.

    We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence...As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.

    At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.”

    p. 53

17. 

    Bombing: A method of warfare which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned because of its effects upon women, children, the aged, the sick, and other non-combatants, unless these happen to have resided in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Osaka, etc., though not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Cf. missile.

    p. 27

18. 

    “If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact—while it lasts—that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.”

    p. 60

19. 

    One man, one vote: A legal doctrine requiring that, from time to time, old gerrymanders be replaced with new ones. The object of this is the achievement of genuine democracy.

    p. 30

20. 

    “We need a reserve of life, every kind of life,” he explained. “Today for the spirit—a glimpse of space and green. Tomorrow for survival, flat-out survival.”

    p. 53

21. 

    History does not tend to the better, Doc, it does not, it does not. We imagine so because events have produced our glorious selves. Think, however. Put aside the romantic legends and look at the facts. The average Frenchman in 1800 was no more unfree than the average Englishman. The French Empire could have brought Europe together, and could have been liberalized from within, and there might have been no World War I in which Western civilization cut its own throat. Because that’s what’s happened, you know. We’re still busy bleeding to death, but we haven’t far to go now.

    p. 50

22. 

    Missile: A self-contained device which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned because of its effects upon women, children, the aged, the sick, and other non-combatants, unless these happen to have resided in Saigon, Da Nang, Hué, etc. Cf. bombing.

    p. 30

That’s all the quotes.

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