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Robert Silverberg
117 quotes
“Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal" in Hell's Cartographers (1975) edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison
“Dinoli had to clawed himself to first rank in public relations by sheer exertion, coupled with judicious backstabbing.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Science Fiction Quarterly (February 1958), p. 12
“His name would fade from the front pages in a few days; he knew too much about communications media to believe that his current notoriety would last.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is is that Entropy Eventually Wins.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“May I be struck dead for saying this if I don’t mean it with all my heart: I wish the Lord and all his prophets would disappear and leave us alone. We’ve had enough religion for one season.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is a magnet: repels some, attracts many, leaves no one unmoved.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In The Far Side of Time: Thirteen Original Stories, edited by Roger Elwood; reprinted in The Collected Stories Volume 4: Trips 1972-73, , p. 161
“Moas aren’t very bright,” Gracchus answers. “That’s one good reason why they became extinct.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract developments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody’s thought it.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before you began your travels you were told how essential it was to define your intended role. Were you going to be a tourist, or an explorer, or an infiltrator? Those are the choices that confront anyone arriving at a new place. Each bears its special risks.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Transforming happy primitive farmers into sophisticated twentieth-century agriculturalists is ultimately as useless a pastime as training fleas to jump through hoops.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—as playing chess.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!” Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was desperate to get out of Vronsky and escape from all the bickering and maneuvering, the endless meetings and memoranda, the feinting and counterfeinting, all the ugly political crap that scientists indulge in when they turn into administrators.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't think I've gone insane. If I’m seen enough to be worried about my sanity, how crazy can I be? Or am I just fooling myself?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for...although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Believe me.” “I learn a long time ago,” Hitchcock said, “when a man say, ‘believe me,’ that's the one thing I shouldn't do.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Originally published in the February 1990 issue of Playboy. Reprinted in Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection, p. 513
“The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know, Mattison thinks. That’s cool. I don't know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to hell with it.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not all lawyers are annoying. Some are dead.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never pass by a chance to shut up.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Take this as a bit of easy wisdom: people who try to rule over other people are going to be hated.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all bureaucrats, he was bewildered by an unpredictable development.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only a man who doubts his own bravery bristles when called a coward.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt an unmanly pity for the beasts we slew, for I fear I don’t really have the killer instinct. I don’t have the starving instinct either, though, and so I fired away.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man who lies to himself is the worst liar of all.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The priest had once told Rosita Estancia that her younger brother Charley was a damned soul, and Charley had found out about it. In a way, he was rather flattered.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why conjure up galactic spaceships when meteors were so common?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evidently a lot of people were yelling “Flying saucer!” tonight, because the announcers were going to great pains to insist that it was nothing but a meteor.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the Government was going to all this trouble to keep people calm, then there had to be something big to worry about. That much was axiomatic.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have come to prefer something looser, a rough sort of definition which says simply that science fiction attempts to portray that which does not exist, a speculative reality, but endeavors to explore the consequences of such a speculation in a rigorous, systematic, and scientifically plausible way.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fascination of what’s difficult,” said Chalk. “It spins the world on its bearings.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But, though he trusted his intuitive judgments, he rarely acted on them until he had had time to make a more rational reconnaissance.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, Chalk had little need for further money. It had motivated him once, but not now. Nor did the acquisition of greater power please him much. Despite the customary theories, Chalk had attained sufficient power so that he was willing to stop expanding if only he could be sure of holding what he had. No, it was something else, something inner, that governed his decisions now. When the love of money and the love of power are both sated, the love of love remains.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do I chatter?” “Should I be honest or should I be tactful?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source