Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Joe Haldeman
51 quotes
“Most aliens in science fiction aren’t truly alien, and that’s not because science fiction writers lack imagination, but because the purpose of an alien in a story is usually to provide a meaningful distortion of human nature.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s an improvement?” “Who can say? But that’s revolution: throw the old set of bastards out and install your own set. At least it’ll be different.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any time somebody starts out a sentence with your name, Leonard thought, they’re trying to sell you something.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ll be frank with you.” Leonard reflected that that was one of the least trust-inspiring phrases in the language.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was full of jargon, charts and the kind of vague mathematics that social scientists admire.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One class of crackpots felt that Harrison had betrayed humanity, giving conquering hordes of aliens a road map back to Earth. The details of what they would do to us, and why, provided an interesting refraction of the individual crackpot’s problems.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem with most people,” Samuel cut in, “isn’t that they don’t know a lot of things. Just that most of what they know is wrong.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“YOU ARE VERY SUPERSTITIOUS. I HAVE FOUND THIS TO BE NOT UNCOMMON AMONG MATHEMATICIANS.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A person who thinks he learns science from science fiction is like one who thinks he learns history from historical novels, and he deserves what he gets.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Key West is lousy with writers, mostly poor writers, in one sense of that word or the other.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good writer remembered everything and then forgot it when he sat down to write, and reinvented it so the writing would be more real than the memory. Experience was important, but imagination was more important.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You do this by yourself? You’re God?” “There’s not just one of me. In fact, it would be meaningless to assign a number to us, but I guess you could say that all together, we are God…and the Devil, and the Cosmic Puppet master, and the Grand Unification Theory, the Great Pumpkin and everything else. When we consider ourselves as a group, let me see, I guess a human translation of our name would be the Spacio-Temporal Adjustment Board.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is simple. The only thing that’s simple is that nothing is simple.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there...the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice“ had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never found anyone else and I don’t want anyone else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“CAROL: You don’t care for the music? JACQUE: Music! It’s just a gimmick to sell lutes and flutes.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re inferring from an absence of data,” Jacque said. “That’s lousy science.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a physical way we’re closer than any civilian pair could be, since in full combat jack we are this one creature with twenty arms and legs, with ten brains, with five vaginas and five penises. Some people call the feeling godlike, and I think there have been gods who were constructed along similar lines. The one I grew up with was an old white-bearded Caucasian gent without even one vagina.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe after the war we’ll be civilized again. That’s the way it has always happened in the past.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We did it with their government’s foreknowledge and permission, of course—and there were no civilian casualties, equally of course. Once they’re dead they’re rebels.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was an ideological war for some—the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn’t true.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She smiled. “I wouldn’t mind. Is that a difference between men and women or between you and me?” “I think it’s a difference between you and merely sane people.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody else in that platoon can tell a Hamiltonian from a hamburger.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You were a Jesuit?” “Franciscan. We run a close second in being pains in the ass.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human nature does change, and the fact that we’ve developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise there would be no universe. Unless we’re the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there’s no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we’re the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Somebody does have to be first. But maybe the first is always the last.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’re actually a soldier,” he said to me, “and you go along with this foolishness?” “I didn’t ask to be a soldier. And I can’t imagine a peace as foolish as this war we’re in.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some are born crazy,” Amelia said. “Some achieve craziness. We had craziness thrust upon us.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The generator was worth its weight in bureaucrats.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re in jail, Charlie.” I made a gesture that didn’t knock anything over. “We can’t see the bars because they’re over the horizon.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more leaves, the more Tree.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fathers and daughters don’t communicate that well even when alien languages and secret conspiracies aren’t involved.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fish and chickens were the only animals we’d had aboard in zerogee. Fish can’t tell the difference and chickens are too dumb to care.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could have argued with his logic, but over the years have learned to find more pleasant ways to waste my time.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But all I have is hearsay, passed on by others of my kind.” “Including this ‘nameless’ stuff,” I said. “That’s true. And at various times in my life, I’ve wondered whether it might not be a delusion—some sort of fiction that we share. Like a religion: there’s no way you or I could prove that the nameless don’t exist.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My own religion, if you can call it that, had changed in its fundamental premise, but not its basic assertion: I’d always told religious friends that there may or may not be a God, but if there is one, I wouldn’t want to have him over for dinner. I’ll stand by that last part.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn’t involuntary.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rationalism doesn’t require “belief,” only observation. The real, measurable world doesn’t care what you believe.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you asked him, he would say the only connection between free will and religion in his life was the fact that he hadn’t set foot in a synagogue since he turned eighteen.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody rich and happy.” She smiled. “Also complacent and rather stupid, you may have noticed.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowing the real world makes your imaginary world more believable.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: None So Blind (1996), Introduction.