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Robert Sheckley

181 quotes

“Outside the curtained windows, Paris stewed in its miasma of self-congratulation and diesel fumes.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The trip to South Lake took another three hours. Blackwell stared out the window the whole time looking at nothing, which is to say, New Jersey.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was the sort of man the essence of whose presence is absence.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It might have meant something, or it might not have. That was the thing about uncertainty, you were never sure.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a moist, fertile, decaying sort of odor in the air. Florida was the sort of place that always seemed to be threatening to slip out of time and go back to the Paleozoic where it belonged. The light was a tawny gold filtered through a fragmented wall of green.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I beg of you to take this warning seriously, even though these people may be crazies. Since the invention of gunpowder, crazies have been bad news.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dickerson watched the telephone like a man looking at a sleeping cobra. It could spring into virulent life at any moment, bite him with its hollow fangs, flood his system with the intellectual equivalent of poison, force him to leave the tried-and-true path of safe routine and jump into the dangerous and unpredictable unknown.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then the red telephone rang. Dickerson’s heart gave a tremendous lurch. He closed his eyes, composing himself by reciting the mantra Dr. Mensch had given him: “Om mane padme hum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We of the Hunt are part of the solution. We offer voluntary murder as a substitute for war. You know that mankind will never be satisfied unless it is killing something. People can’t even properly enjoy a landscape unless there’s something moving across it that can be shot at.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The scientist, who examines everything, should look at himself. Tentatively I would define him as a discovery-producing animal whose products fall from him as naturally and as thoughtlessly as a hen produces eggs. Like the hen, he is largely indifferent to the use made of his products. Scientists are mostly not in favour of atom bombs, of course, and hens presumably dislike omelettes; but both are realists and go along with the conditions they find. The trouble is, science is oriented towards practical results, with no regard for the possible consequences. Thus, science is morally an imbecile, dishing up its confections blindly for whoever is able to use them. The likeliest user is always the exploiter—the manufacturer, military man, businessman and politician. Science produces what these highly motivated men require—processes characterized by repeatability and controllability, with which populations can be enchanted and enslaved. For what, after all, is the politician’s dream? It is a docile and predictable population, cheerful and well content with their compensations. This sheep-like state is precisely the great hope that the sciences hold out to us. For science is not deeply concerned about our differences but focuses instead on our similarities, the vulnerable places through which we can be manipulated and controlled. If the unseen worlds that surround and interpenetrate us were ever understood according to the criteria of science, what a nightmare existence would become! For discovery is followed by exploitation, which is followed by laws which confirm the exploiters in the possession of their spoils. That is to say, after the scientist comes the industrialist, and after him comes the lawyer. And after the lawyer, cheerfully smiling, ready to explain the divine inevitability of it all, comes the cleric.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that many people read science fiction for a sense of participation in the wonders to come. The quest for non-ordinary reality is something more than curiosity and wishful thinking. We are too crowded in our every day lives by replicas of ourselves and by the repetitious artifacts of our days and nights. But we do not quite believe in this prosaic world. Continually we are reminded of the strangeness of birth and death, the vastness of time and space, the unknowability of ourselves. One would like to live differently, more significantly. One would like to participate in events more meaningful than our daily round, feel sensations more exquisite than is our usual lot. One reads science fiction in order momentarily to transcend the dull quality of everyday life. There is a reason behind the search for the ineffable. The death of God is argued by the theologians; but for most of us it is a fact of everyday life. ‘God’ is a word with unfortunate connotations for many. By it I mean the fundamental mystery forever untouched by our rationality.… This mystery is what we do not have any more. Our meagre substitute is the religion of man living on the Earth. We understand our ethical duties very well, we believe in them and try to follow them. But there is the secret sadness still remaining, the sense that we were born to quest, that our essence is unknowable, that we are plant and phantom, creatures of unknown dimensions. But all we come face to face with is our actual condition: we are ghosts smothered in bread and butter.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although the mystics have left us many ways and means for achieving this enlightened state of mind, few of us ever realise it. It is self-defeating to believe in a method when it does not bring the desired results, not for you nor for anyone you know. The tool for encountering enlightenment is meditation—a word one usually intones in reverential manner. Meditation purports to do for the mind what organic foods do for the body. It is extremely good for you, although admittedly not as much fun as a good movie. Or even a bad movie. It is a disarmingly simple practice, but there are difficulties. I have followed an ancient system of counting my breaths. You count up to ten, and then begin again, always focusing on the breath. Unfortunately, I usually lose count and after I’ve lost count a few times I lose interest. But when I finally do succeed in quieting my mind and achieving a measure of one-pointedness, something very strange happens. I find that I have plugged into my own internal music station. This music system broadcasts in my head continually, interrupted only by spot news flashes from 1951. I don’t even like most of the stuff it dishes up, and the arrangements are uniformly terrible. So, in my own experience, meditation is just like waiting at an airport, with its piped-in music and meaningless announcements. But with one important difference—in an airport you know that sooner or later you are going to takeoff and fly. So much for meditation. And so much for backpacking through the inner world.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Esotericism, which is legal, but not too much fun, prescribes to our condition. But when one tries to follow a spiritual path, nothing much happens for most of us. Faced with this lack of results, the esoteric schools put the blame squarely on us rather than on any insufficiency in their doctrines or methods. Finally, they explain our failure by taking refuge in paradoxes. They tell us, for example, that we can attain only by not wanting to attain—a neat double bind. Some esoteric schools caution the disciple not to practise the extraordinary powers which we will acquire in the course of our work. This is surely an extraordinary statement. Most of us can’t muster the power to give up smoking, much less to levitate.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a matter of fact, I am amazed at what has happened to science fiction in recent years. It has become a heavy academic field. And science fiction writers are being accorded a respect now, which I, as one of their peers and well-wishers, can only view with alarm and suspicion. It seems like only yesterday, though it was in fact some 20 years ago, that all of us were writing pulp-action stories about a nebulous and ill-defined region that we called the future. Now our yarns are analysed in university classrooms for virtues we never suspected that they had. This is particularly true in America, the country that coined the word ‘overkill’ and then demonstrated its practical applications.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Should I have lectured them on all men being equal? Those people knew that all men were not equal, and that justice was the exclusive prerogative of the ruling class. They viewed all egalitarian ideas as devilish perversions, to be resisted to the death. “Democracy is not natural law. Men must be educated to it. Democracy is a difficult and advanced concept for men whose instinct is to band together in wolf packs under a single leader. Effective democracy requires the exercise of responsibility and fairness to others. For the people of the future Earth, this was an outlandish concept: others were there only to be used.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Silversmith lay in bed sipping seltzer and thinking deep brooding thoughts about the impossibility of happiness and the elusiveness of satisfaction. Despite having the world’s luxuries set before him—or because of it—he was bored and had been for weeks. It seemed damned unfair to him, to be able to get anything you wanted, but to be unable to enjoy what you could get. When you came right down to it, life was a disappointment, and the best it had to offer was never quite good enough. The roast duck was never as crisp as advertised, and the water in the swimming pool was always a shade too warm or too cold. How elusive was the quest for quality! For ten dollars you could buy a pretty fair steak; for a hundred dollars you could get a really good Porterhouse; for a thousand dollars you could buy a kilo of Kobe beef that had been massaged by the hands of consecrated virgins, together with a genius chef to prepare it. And it would be very good indeed. But not a thousand dollars good. The more you paid, the less progress you made toward that quintessence of beef that that the angels eat when God throws his yearly banquet for the staff.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evil,” the priest said, after he had settled comfortably into Barrent’s best chair, “is that force within us which inspires men to acts of strength and endurance. The worship of Evil is essentially the worship of oneself, and therefore the only true worship. The self which one worships is the ideal social being; the man content in his niche in society, yet ready to grasp any opportunity for advancement; the man who meets death with dignity, who kills without the demeaning vice of pity. Evil is cruel, since it is a true reflection of the uncaring and insensate universe. Evil is eternal and unchanging, although it comes to us in the many forms of protean life.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On Omega, the law is supreme. Hidden and revealed, sacred and profane, the law governs the actions of all citizens, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high. Without the law, there could be no privileges for those who made the law; therefore the law was absolutely necessary. Without the law and its stern enforcement, Omega would be an unthinkable chaos in which a man’s rights could extend only as far and as long as he personally could enforce them. This anarchy would mean the end of Omegan society; and particularly, it would mean the end of those senior citizens of the ruling class who had grown high in status, but whose skill with a gun had long passed its peak. Therefore the law was necessary. But Omega was also a criminal society, composed entirely of individuals who had broken the laws of Earth. It was a society which, in the final analysis, stressed individual endeavor. It was a society in which the lawbreaker was king; a society in which crimes were not only condoned but were admired and even rewarded; a society in which deviation from the rules was judged solely on its degree of success. And this resulted in the paradox of a criminal society with absolute laws which were meant to be broken.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The law,” he said, “is above the criminal and the judge, and rules them both. The law is inescapable, for an action is either lawful or unlawful. The law, indeed, may be said to have a life of its own, an existence quite apart from the finite lives of the beings who administer it. The law governs every aspect of human behavior; therefore, to the same extent that humans are lawful beings, the law is human. And being human, the law has its idiosyncrasies, just as a man has his. For a citizen who abides by the law, the law is distant and difficult to find. For those who reject and violate it, the law emerges from its musty sepulchers and goes in search of the transgressor.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Would you define Good for me, Citizen Abbot?” “Certainly. Good is that force within us which inspires men to acts of conformity and subservience. The worship of Good is essentially the worship of oneself, and therefore the only true worship. The self which one worships is the ideal social being: the man content in his niche in society, yet ready to creatively advance his status. Good is gentle, since it is a true reflection of the loving and pitying universe. Good is continually changing in its aspects, although it comes to us in the... You have a strange look on your face, young man.” “I’m sorry, Citizen Abbot. I believe I heard that sermon, or one very much like it.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And do not think,” Manisfree said, “that we absolve ourselves from blame in this situation. Although we teachers purport to know more than other men, we have usually chosen to remain aloof from public life. Practical, hardheaded men of the world have always frightened us; and those men, in their hardheaded way, have brought us to this.” “Nor is aloofness our only failure,” said Hanley of Anthropology. “Let me point out that we have taught—badly! Our few promising students became teachers, thus insulating themselves as we had. The rest of our students sat through the sleep-provoking drone of our lectures, eager only to depart and take their places in a mad world. We did not touch them, Joenes, we did not move them, and we did not teach them to think.” “In fact,” said Blake of Physics, “we did quite the contrary. We managed to equip most of our students with a definite hatred of thinking. They learned to view culture with the greatest suspicion, to ignore ethics, and to consider the sciences solely as a means of making money. This was our responsibility and our failure. The outcome of that failure is the world.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think he suspected I was lying; but it was the sort of large-scale, flamboyant lie that appealed to him. As he told me later, only pettiness annoyed him. He delighted in color and movement, and in the protean appearance of things. In this respect, he told me, he was a true Venetian. Like many other subjects of the Serenissima, he believed in style over content, art over life, appearance over reality, and form over substance. He believed simultaneously in fate and free will. He viewed life as a sort of Renaissance melodrama, complete with unexpected appearances and disappearances, heartrending confrontations, preposterous coincidences, disguises and doubles, switched twins and mysteries of birth; all revolving around an obscure and melancholy point of honor. And, of course, he was perfectly right.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel no moral compunction in the slightest at my so-called crime. If a man cannot retain control of his own body, then he deserves to lose it. I have observed, during a long and varied lifetime, that men will give their bodies to any rogue who asks, and will enslave their minds to the first voice that commands them to obey. This is why the vast majority of men cannot keep even their natural birthright of a mind and body, but choose instead to rid themselves of those embarrassing emblems of freedom.” “That,” Detective Urdorf said, “is the classic apologia of the criminal.” “That which you call a crime when one man does it,” Kraggash said, “you call government when many men do it. Personally, I fail to see the distinction; and failing to see it, I refuse to live by it.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Machines!” the Clerk said scornfully. “We have many of them, some exquisitely complex. But event the best of them are much like idiot savants. They do adequately on tedious straightforward tasks like building stars or destroying planets. But give them something tough, like solacing a widow, and they simply go to pieces. Would you believe it, the largest computer in our section can landscape an entire planet; but it cannot fry an egg or carry a tune, and it knows less about ethics than a newborn wolf cub. Would you want something like that to run your life?” “Of course not,” Carmody said. “But couldn’t someone build a machine with creativity and judgment?” “Someone has,” the Clerk said. “It has been designed to learn from experience, which means that it must make errors in order to arrive at truths. It comes in many shapes and sizes, most of them quite portable. Its flaws are readily apparent, but seem to exist as necessary counterweights to it virtues. No one has yet improved on the basic design, though many have tried. This ingenious device is called ‘intelligent life.’”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Earth, Earth,” the short, alien Carmody mused. “I think I remember the name now. There was a recent study of isolated worlds and the peculiarities of their development. Earth was mentioned as a planet covered with an obsessively overproductive species. Object manipulation is their outstanding modality. Their project is an attempt to live in their own, ever-accumulating waste products. In short, Earth is diseased place. I believe it is being phased out of the Galactic Master Plan on the basis of chronic cosmic incompatibility. The place will then be rehabilitated and turned into a refuge for daffodils.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a housebuilding business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called ‘religion,’ and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But I’ll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse.” “What’s that?” Carmody asked. “It’s the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, ‘Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.’ The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.” “I think I see what you mean,” Carmody said. “I’ve made it too complicated,” Maudsley said. “There’s a much simpler reason for avoiding religion.” “What’s that?” “Just consider its style—bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans—fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can’t believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your predator is close behind you and will infallibly be your death.” “I don’t doubt it,” Carmody said, in a moment of strange calm.” But in terms of long-range planning, I never did expect to get out of this Universe alive.” “That is meaningless,” the Prize said. “The fact is, you have lost everything.” “I don’t agree,” Carmody said. “Permit me to point out that I am presently still alive.” “Agreed. But only for the moment.” “I have always been alive only for the moment,” Carmody said. “I could never count on more. It was my error to expect more. That holds true, I believe, for all of my possible and potential circumstances.” “Then what do you hope to achieve with your moment?” “Nothing,” Carmody said. “Everything.” “I don’t understand you any longer,” the Prize said. “Something about you has changed, Carmody. What is it?” “A minor thing,” Carmody told him. “I have simply given up a longevity which I never possessed anyhow. I have turned away from the con game which the Gods run in their heavenly sideshow. I no longer care under which shell the pea of immortality might be found. I don’t need it. I have my moment, which is quite enough.” “Saint Carmody,” the Prize said, in tones of deepest sarcasm. “No more than a shadow’s breadth separates you and death! What will you do now with your pitiable moment?” “I shall continue to live it,” Carmody said. “That is what moments are for.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He said, “Don’t you think that pleas based on upon the assumption of one’s own objectivity are somewhat disingenuous, to say the least?” The crowd nodded. The tall man said easily, “Granted that all personal judgments are inherently biased. Still, judgment is the only instrument of discrimination at our disposal, and it is our work as living, developing creatures to make discriminations, from which value-judgments inevitably flow. This must be done despite the subjectivity paradox implied in making an ‘objective’ statement. That is why I say unequivocably that you were in the wrong, and no amount of reference to the observer observed dichotomy is going to change that.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have sympathized with the misplaced obsessive emotionality you have thrown into your delusional activities.” “What do you mean, ‘delusional’? I know what I’m doing!” The priest shook his head gently. “Whatever you think is wrong. I suppose you feel that you live your own life and strive to achieve your goals?” “Well, of course!” “But that is not the case at all. Actually, you have no independent life of your own. You do not live, you are lived! You are a completely automatic mechanism with a built-in I-reflex. Your life has no meaning, since you are not even a person. You are nothing more than a short-lived, inconsistent, and accidental collection of tendencies. Your only possible relevance is as the unwitting vehicle for the purpose of bringing forth the Avatar.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Population growth and the multifarious forms of pollution: the human animal was overgrazing his range. The human animal had destroyed everything in sight, killed off the other big animals, used up millions of years of deposits of fresh water, oil, coal, and minerals. Fragile ecosystems had been pushed to the limit, some of them beyond recovery. The death of the earth was undramatic, but it was happening, and fast. And the governments continued to squabble and defend their various economic, religious, and social doctrines. The wealth of nations large and small was bled into the continuing efforts to increase the size, ingenuity, and ferocity of the armed forces. The humans were killer ants, devoting all their time to breeding more powerful mandibles. Something had to be done immediately to preserve and maintain the great interlocking global system of ecosystems that sustained all life upon the earth. Only by managing the entire earth as a single unit could the basis of life continue on beyond the next century or two. But twentieth-century civilization was locked into its self-destructive groove. Nothing could be officially done until the various threats became much more threatening. But by the time that stage had been reached, it would probably be too late to do anything.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My dear Dahl, the first, the primary, task is to bring the earth back into ecological balance. That’s your task, you and the Bahamas Corporation. Ours is to give people something exciting to do other than war while that is going on. Without us and our Hunt, you and your high-minded scientists will just be another group of dreamers living in an imaginary kingdom of sweet reason while the madness of real politics rages all around you. Be practical, Dahl, let’s do something together.” “There is something in what you say,” Dahl admitted. “I’ve been aware for some time of the shortcomings inherent in the sane, dispassionate thinking that we scientists advocate. People don’t pay any attention. Unless there’s an emergency like Love Canal or Chernobyl, the idea of maintaining and upgrading the earth and its ecosystems is not exactly box-office.”
Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source