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Robert Silverberg
117 quotes
“She was strikingly ignorant, but he had known that from the start. What he had not known was how quickly her ignorance would cease to seem charming and would begin to seem contemptible.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Forget it. No, don’t forget it. Don’t forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The cages are ready in case any of the enemies are captured.” “You mean us?” “Yes. Enemies.” Muller’s eyes glittered with sudden paranoid fury; it was alarming how easily he slipped from rational discourse to that cold blaze. “Homo sapiens. The most dangerous, the most ruthless, the most despicable beast in the universe!” “You say it as if you believe it.” “I do.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, you know I’m no bigot, Lorie. I don’t care how many eyes, tentacles, eating orifices, or antennae an organism happens to have, so long as it knows its stuff. What I object to is having someone who is professionally inferior jacked into an expedition simply for the sake of racial balance.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They equally detest our third boss, who is Pilazinool of Shilamak, the big expert on intuitive analysis. Which means the science of jumping to conclusions. He’s good at it.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The thing about aliens is that they tend to be so alien.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The funeral customs of alien races defy all comprehension. So do the funeral customs of non-alien races. Can you explain to me the virtue of putting dead people in a box and burying the box in the ground?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The higher powers reward us most tenderly by their absence from our lives.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing was his business, these days. When a man had no business, he had to appoint himself to some. So he was here to do research, ostensibly, which is to say to snoop and spy.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you treat a rational autonomous creature as though he’s a mere beast, what does that make you?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What counts is what’s happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that’s a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She seems fond of him. Getting to know him better, as though she has surmounted the barrier of cultural differences that made him seem so alien to her before. And he the same with her. The separations dwindling. Her world is not his, but he thinks he could adjust to some of its unfamiliar assumptions. Strike up a closeness. He’s a man, she’s a woman, right? The basics. All the rest is façade.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The style in which it was written told me much: I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love of others begins with love of self.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What value is lineage to a drowning man?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are born by accident into a purely random universe.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.” “So?” “What do I need it for?” “Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Am I loyal, or am I loyal? But I don’t like the way things are going. It’s a citizen’s right to worry about the state of the realm, isn’t it? If matters are not to our liking, we should speak up. That’s our tradition, isn’t it? If we allow small abuses now, who knows what sort of things he’ll be doing five years on!”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What matters,” he said earnestly, “is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You speak very generally,” Valentine said. “I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Come,” Deliamber said. “There is a vast journey ahead of us.” “I know. That’s why I don’t want to get up.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But why?” he asked Deliamber. The Vroon replied, “Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are not accustomed to threats here,” Lorivade declared. “I make no threat. I speak only of inevitable consequences.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source