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Clifford D. Simak

129 quotes

“I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned with where we, as a race, may be going and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme — if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in the Associated Press obituary (27 April 1988)
“There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is understood and only remains a mystery because I want it so. The mystery of the nighthawk against a darkening sky, the puzzle of the firefly along the lilac hedge.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You do not belong to any bona fide religion that prohibits killing?” “I presume I could classify myself as a Christian,” said Sutton. “I believe there is a Commandment about killing.” The robot shook his head. “It doesn’t count.” “It is clear and specific,” Sutton argued. “It says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” “It is all of that,” the robot told him. “But it has been discredited. You humans discredited it yourselves. You never obeyed it. You either obey a law or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a wonder to me,” said Adams sourly, “that you don’t simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him and he felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and sureness of it.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope...the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Propaganda,” Trevor said. “Let’s call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton. “That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most authorities in economics and sociology regard such an organization as a city an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well. No creature of the highly nervous structure necessary to develop a culture, they point out, would be able to survive within such restricted limits. The result, if it were tried, these authorities say, would lead to mass neuroticism which in a short period of time would destroy the very culture which had built the city.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These people must be helped to find themselves in this new world, but they must not know that they’re being helped. To let them know would destroy confidence and dignity, and human dignity is the keystone of any civilization.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Individualists would have little use for a device which would make them understand one another, for they would not care whether they understood one another.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The past, he said. The past is too much with me. And the past has made me useless. I have too much to remember—so much to remember that it becomes more important than the things there are to do. I’m living in the past and that is no way to live.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is a bow and arrow? It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war. It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering. It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb. It is a symbol of a way of life.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The people finally know. They've been told about the mutants. And they hated the mutants. Of course, they hated them. They hated them because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The party was beginning to get noisy—not boisterous, but noisy. It was beginning to acquire that stale air of futility to which, in the end, all parties must fall victim.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You sometimes get a thrill at knowing where you are. You’re often filled with wonder, but more often you are puzzled. You are reminded, again and yet again, of how insignificant you are. And there are times when you forget that you are human. You’re just a blob of life—brother to everything that ever existed or ever will exist.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They sat for a moment, regarding one another; neither understanding. As if we were two aliens, thought Blaine. With viewpoints that did not come within a million miles of coinciding, and yet they both were men.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He knew that there was death—that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where would one find an answer? For the belief—the will to believe—was engrained deeply in the human fiber. Not entirely, either, in the matrix of the present situation, but in the blood and bone of Man clear back to the caves. There was in the soul of Man a certain deadly fascination with all things macabre. The situation as it stood had been grasped willingly, almost eagerly, by men for whom the world had become a rather tame and vapid place with no terror in it beyond the brute force terror of atomic weapons and the dread uncertainty of unstable men in power.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For this, he realized, was the future. It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened—an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark; there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place—until this very moment when he and his machine had been thrust upon it, intruders who had overstepped their time.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now? For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In those villages, he wondered, how much ability and genius might be lying barren, ability and genius that the world could use but would never know because of the intolerance and hate which was held against the very people who were least qualified as the targets of it. And the pity of it was that such hate and such intolerance would never have been born, could never have existed, had it not been for men like Finn—the bigots and the egomaniacs; the harsh, stern Puritans; the little men who felt the need of power to lift them from their smallness.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was not his fight. Not personally his fight. No more his fight than any one of them. But he had made it his. Because of Stone, because of Rand and Harriet, because of priest who’d hounded him across half the continent, he had tried to make a fight of it. And perhaps, as well, because of something undefinable, unknown to himself, unsuspected in himself—some crazy idealism, some deep-rooted sense of justice, some basic aversion to bullies and bigots and reformers.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than as a person.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They’d lived all their life on Earth; they knew nothing but the Earth. They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was not really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anita,” he asked, “are there really werewolves?” “Yes,” she told him. “Your werewolves are down there.” And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was so much knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of the little that he knew. There were men on Earth who could make sense of it. Men who would give anything short of their very lives to know the little that he knew, and could put it all to use. Out among the stars lay a massive body of knowledge, some of it an extension of what mankind knew, some of it concerning matters which Man had not yet suspected, and used in ways and for purposes that Man had not as yet imagined. And never might imagine, if left on his own.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The impulse patterns which carried creatures star to star were almost instantaneous, no matter what the distance. He stood and thought about it and it still was hard, he admitted to himself, for a person to believe.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His mind went back to that strange business of the spiritual force and the even stranger machine which had been built eons ago, by means of which the galactic people were able to establish contact with the force. There was a name for that machine, but there was no word in the English language which closely approximated it. "Talisman" was the closest, but Talisman was too crude a word. Although that had been the word that Ulysses had used when, some years ago, they had talked of it.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Hazer would be arriving at about the same time as Ulysses and the three of them could spend a pleasant evening. It was not too often that two good friends ever visited here at once. He stood a bit aghast at thinking of the Hazer as a friend, for more than likely the being itself was one he had never met. But that made little difference, for a Hazer, any Hazer, would turn out to be a friend.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Could it be, he wondered, that the goldenness was the Hazers' life force and that they wore it like a cloak, as a sort of over-all disguise? Did they wear that life force on the outside of them while all other creatures wore it on the inside?”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had acted on an impulse, with no thought at all. The girl had asked protection and here she had protection, here nothing in the world ever could get at her. But she was a human being and no human being, other than himself, should have ever crossed the threshold. But it was done and there was no way to change it. Once across the threshold, there was no way to change it.”
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source