Robert Sheckley
122 quotes
Biography
"When the first man sets foot on the surface of Mars, we will participate only to the extent of watching a shadowy replay of the great event on television. You know already how it will go: announcers with sonorous voices will tell us exactly what is happening. And they will also cue us as to the proper emotions we should feel it every stage of the great adventure. That will be our share in the conquest of other worlds."
"In this talk I have tried to present some of my own reality, as far as I am able, at one particular time in my life. These are the things that make up my momentary universe. No summary is possible, even though I am at the end of my time here. Everything must remain unresolved, just as it in fact is. My subject matter escapes the confines of my definitions, for there is no datum that is not somehow pertinent to my situation. It is all part of the vast and uncompleted jigsaw puzzle that is our lives."
"It is not very logical to look over the attributes you possess and then declare that they are the most important attributes in the universe."
"I know you’re sane and you know you’re sane. But what if we’re both wrong?"
"I took it with equanimity, however: I have long known that fortune’s a whore and life itself a kind of stupid muddle. I am not a religious man. Far from it. I hold, if anything, a belief which I believe was once ascribed to the Gnostics: that Satan won out over God, not the other way around, and the Dark Prince runs things in the dismal and disastrous way that suits his nature. I knew that everything was just chance and bad luck, in a universe in which things were stacked against us and even our ruling deity hated us."
"“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I said, “unless you accompany it with large sums of money.”"
"When the people have to leave a place, their dreams leave first."
"This planet’s secret menace was—freedom!"
"Paradox is the inevitable forerunner of chaos."
"All very unreasonable, but Arthur Gammet was beginning to suspect that most wizards were unreasonable people."
"Ifs and buts could erode the soundest of principles."
"“That’s so like you Terrans,” Melith remarked sadly. “You want responsibility only if it doesn’t incur risk. That’s a wrong attitude for running a government.”"
"“Love and war,” he said, “are Earth’s two staple commodities. We’ve been turning them both out in bumper crops since the beginning of time.”"
"That’s the whole point! Anyone can buy sex. Good Lord, it’s the cheapest thing in the universe, next to human life."
"Mr. Rath’s iron face registered a rather corrugated disgust. People were useless as witnesses. Worse than useless, since they were frequently misleading. For reliability, give him a robot every time."
"I poured Franklin another cup of coffee and he looked at me, his big eyes pleading. The deadheads always look like that when we reach this point. They think that Mars is like Alaska in the ’70s, or Antarctica in 2000; a frontier for brave, determined men. But Mars isn’t a frontier. It’s a dead end."
"Society as a whole, he reminded himself, must be protected against the individual, just as a human body must be protected against malfunction of any of its parts. As fond as you might be of your gall bladder, you would sacrifice it mercilessly if it were going to impair the rest of you."
"You simply can’t throw strangers together at random and expect the fiery, quick romance to turn into love. Love has its own rules and enforces them rigidly."
"Had he been right or was he just another visionary?"
"Sven had the sensation of discovering a new world, a world no civilized man had ever encountered. He was amazed to discover that weirder customs could be found on Earth than anywhere else in the galaxy."
"Hope could be dangerous, desire could be catastrophic."
"It was one hell of an inspection when you went around finding how many sane men you had left."
"I found her charming, went home and thought no more about her. Or, I thought I would think no more about her. But in the following days and nights her image remained obsessively before my eyes. My appetite fell off and I began sleeping badly. My computer checked out the relevant data and told me that I might conceivably be having a nervous breakdown; but the strongest inference was that I was in love."
"Charlie Gleister had invented a time machine, but he hadn’t invented it right because it didn’t work."
"Nothing happens for the first time, especially if what you’re trying to do is to invent something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Of course, if nothing happens for the first time, that leaves the apparent problem of how anything happens at all. But the difficulty is entirely semantic: in the eternal recurrence of subatomic configurations of which our world is a simulacrum, there is no question of beginnings or endings. There are only middles, continuations, repetitions. Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint."