The
Collective Heresies of Lazarus Long – Just the most complete
collection of Heinlein literature quotations available (excerpts below)…
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion -- i.e.,
none to speak of.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg ix
Pioneers care little about sending records to the home office; they
are busy staying alive, making babies, and killing off anything in their
way.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg x
A colonist too interested in statistics becomes a statistic himself
-- as a corpse.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg x
At best, history is hard to grasp; at worst, it is a lifeless collection
of questionable records.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg xi
It is clear that this man [Lazurus Long] is, by standards usual in civilized
societies, a barbarian and a rogue.
But it is not for children to judge their parents.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg xii
As may be -- If today I see a man with sandy red hair, a big nose, an
easy disarming grin, and a slightly feral look in his gray-green eyes,
I always wonder how recently the Senior has passed through that part
of the galaxy. If such a stranger comes close to me, I put my hand on
my purse. If he speaks to me, I resolve not to make any wagers or promises.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg xvi
Never tease an old dog; he might have one bite left.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 3
[Also quoted in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, 82. -MN]
Living on Secundus is a privilege, not a right.
--Ira Weatheral quoting Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 7
I don't give advice, people never take it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 8
Oh, I have strong opinions, but a thousand reasoned opinions are never
equal to one case of diving in and finding out.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 9
I'm sorry I won't see the outcome of your experiment. I suspect it will
be the hardest tyranny imaginable; majority rule gives the ruthless
strong man plenty of elbow room to oppress his fellows.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 9
Son, the world doesn't pay off on a good try.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 10
A man ought not to have to die twice . . .
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 11
By what ethical principal did you interfere with my death?
Because we need you, sir.
That's not an ethical reason, just a pragmatic one. The need was not
mutual.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 11
I don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he's picking my pockets.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 11
Or, when the time comes, will you kid yourself that it is really your
duty to hang on? If a man has the temperament for power -- and you have
or you wouldn't be where you are -- he finds it hard to abdicate.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 12
Lazarus, I never let a man be executed for being a fool.
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 15
Ira, I learned centuries back that there is no privacy in any society
crowed enough to need IDs. A law guaranteeing privacy simply insures
that bugs -- microphones and lenses and so forth -- are that much harder
to spot.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 15
Oh, knock it off, Bud; there's no virtue in being old, it just takes
a long time.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 16
Ira, age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity
into arrogant conceit.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 19
I don't believe in anything. I know certain things -- little things,
not the Nine Billion Names of God -- from experience. But I have no
beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 20
I've never argued with the weather. Once a mob wanted to lynch me. I
didn't try to reason with them; I just put a lot of miles between me
and them as fast as I could and never went back there.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 20
I spent my boyhood the way every boy does -- trying to keep my elders
from finding out what I was up to.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 22
Lying is one of the fine arts, Ira, and it seems to be dying out. [...]
I mean as a fine art. There are still plenty of clumsy liars, approximately
as many as there are mouths.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 22
Correction. Most people won't learn even by experience, Ira. Never underestimate
the power of human stupidity.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 24
Live each day as if you were to die next sunrise. Then face each sunrise
as a fresh creation and live for it joyously. And never think about
the past. No regrets, ever.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 25
Son, that phrase is self-contradictory; sense is never common.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 26
I might want to revise my sparkling gems of wisdom -- meaning that extemporaneous
remarks sound better when aren't extemporaneous -- or why politicians
have ghost writers.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 26
No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically
unlikely as what really does happen in this mad universe.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 30
I have never swindled a man. At most I have kept quiet and let him swindle
himself. This does no harm, as a fool cannot be protected from his folly.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 31
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys
the pig.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 31
You're a sentimentalist, Grandson. But a good boy. Trouble is, there
never has been much demand for good boys.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 32
Ishtar, all myths tell the truth if you know how to read them.
--Galahad, Time Enough For Love, pg 45
Half my time is used in the negative work of plucking such officious
officials and ordering that they never again serve in any official capacity.
Then I usually abolish their jobs and all jobs subordinate to them.
I have never noticed any harm from such pruning save that parasites
whose jobs have been eliminated must find some other way to avoid starvation.
(They are welcome to starve -- better if they do. But they don't.)
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 47
Anyone can see a forest fire; skill lies in smelling the first smoke.
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 47
A population one billion-plus so contented, so uniform, so smug that
not one determined assassin shows up in a double decade is seriously
ill no matter how healthy it looks.
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 48
He was a hillbilly, which means that he came from an area uncivilized
even by the loose standards of those days --
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 54
Lazarus, what is a gentleman?
[...] A gentleman was supposed to prefer being a dead lion to being
a live jackal. Me, I've always preferred to be a live lion, so that
puts me outside the rules.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 61
Every impossible rule has its loopholes, every general prohibition creates
its own bootleggers.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 63
David decided to maintain a low profile -- always a smart decision when
one is likely to be shot at. --Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg
65
[...] -- talking is the second of the three real pleasures in life,
and the only thing that sets us apart from the apes. Though just barely.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 66
In a way they were hazardous. So is breathing.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 67
The method used was called dead reckoning, because if you didn't reckon
it correctly you were dead --
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 69
[...] -- a capsule summary of most human progress. By the time you learn
how, it's too late.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 70
[...] heroism often consists in keeping your head in an emergency and
doing the best you can with what you have, instead of panicking and
being shot in the tail. People who fight this way win more battles than
do intentional heroes; a glory hound often throws away the lives of
his mates as well as his own.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 73
[...] the ways of God, and government, and girls are all mysterious
and it is not given to mortal man to understand them.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 75
Some people are ants by nature; they have to work, even when it is useless.
Few people have a talent for constructive laziness.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 77
Son, one of the weirdest things about the human animal is that it grows
up physically years and years before its brain grows up.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 78
Good intentions are no substitute for knowing how a buzz saw works,
Ira; the worst criminals in history have been loaded with good intentions.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 80
We always let water under the bridge lie where Jesus flang it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 91
I was intentionally appealing to her vanity -- and if you think computers
don't have such human foibles, then I suggest that your experience with
them is limited; Minerva always liked to be appreciated, and we two
began to be a team after I realized this. What else can you offer a
machine? Higher pay and longer vacations? Don't be silly.
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 100
[...] just a silly way to drown in vacuum. Thin and unpleasant. Minerva,
the All Powerful in His Majestic Wisdom -- whatever that means -- made
it possible for humans to die peacefully. That being so, unless one
is forced to, it is silly to do it the hard way.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 102
Danger for the sake of danger is for children who don't really believe
they can be killed.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 102
[...] -- danger is no novelty. It is simply something to be faced when
you can't run.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 102
You keep your biscuit trap shut, Son.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 105
Schoolteacher -- lost that job when they caught me teaching the kids
the raw truth; a capital offense anywhere in the galaxy.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 108
Hard to show a profit -- or to conceal one -- if you don't know how
the game is played. It's much safer to break a law knowingly than to
do it through ignorance.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 108
But faith is for the congregation, Ira; it handicaps a priest.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 108
Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than
an optimist, but an optimist has more fun -- and neither can stop the
march of events.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 108
Whoring is like military service, Ira -- okay in the upper brackets,
not so good lower down.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 109
`Put not your faith in Princes', Ira; since they don't produce, they
always steal.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 109
All it takes to get [a reform politician] to break his word is for someone
to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater
good of all the peepul. He'll geek.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 110
Man is a political animal, Ira. You can no more keep him from politicking
than you can keep him from copulating -- and probably shouldn't try.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 111
If the human animal has any value at all, he is too valuable to be property.
If he has an inner dignity, he is much too proud to own other men. I
don't give a damn how scrubbed and perfumed he may be, a slave owner
is subhuman.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 114
But this does not mean that I'll cut my throat when I run into [slavery],
or I would not have lived through my first century. For there is another
bad thing about slavery, Ira; it is impossible to free slaves, they
have to free themselves.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 114
In the first place, very little thinking was ever done in English; it
is not a language suitable to logical thought. Instead, it's an emotive
lingo beautifully adapted to concealing fallacies. A rationalizing language,
not a rational one.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 120
The trouble with defining in words anything as basic as love is that
the definition can't be understood by anyone who hasn't experienced
it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 124
And I'm going to swap you for a dog, Sweetheart, and sell the dog.
--Ishtar, Time Enough For Love, pg 139
Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth
-- but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 158
I've never wasted skull-sweat on revenge; the Comte de Monte-Cristo
syndrome is too much work and not enough fun.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 158
Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter. Women know this instinctively;
that's why they are all smugglers. Men often believe -- or pretend --
that the law is something sacred, or at least a science -- an unfounded
assumption very convenient to governments.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 159
All Eros is custom, dear; there is never anything moral or immoral about
copulation as such, or any of its nonfunctioanl frills. Eros is simply
a way of keeping human beings, individuals, each different -- keeping
them together and happy. It is a survival mechanism developed through
long evolution, and its reproductive function is the least complex aspect
of its very complex and pervasive role in keeping the human race going.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 170
But I tried to make sure they knew the difference between fiction and
history -- difficult, as I wasn't certain that there was a difference.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 176
In my wanderings I have run across magic many times -- which simply
says that I have seen wonders I could not explain.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 176
He shut up, realizing that grim old Mother Nature, red of tooth and
claw, invariably punished damn fools who tried to ignore Her or repeal
Her ordinances. He need not interfere.
--Time Enough For Love, pg 189
Minerva, I make no apology for hypocrisy.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 195
Horns need not give a man a headache. But he does need time to grow
up and mellow and acquire self-confidence before he can wear them with
tolerance and dignity -- and Llita was just the girl who could outfit
him with a fine rack of antlers.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 197
It was root, hog, or die. They were really free -- free to starve.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 207
Minerva, if I sell a horse, I won't guarantee that it has a leg on each
corner; the buyer must count them himself.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 208
Half the battle with any culture is knowing its taboos.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 215
Joe, I learned long before you were born that free tail is invariably
the most expensive sort.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 219
A man never cuts his throat from a sleepless night if has company to
see him through it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 220
Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving
him of either.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 220
`Incest' is a legal term, not a biological one. It designates sexual
union between persons forbidden by law to marry. The act itself is forbidden;
whether such union results in progeny is irrelevant. The prohibitions
vary widely among cultures and are usually, but not always, based on
degrees of consanguinity.
--Minerva, Time Enough For Love, pg 221
If a man pushes a rock, can he ignore an avalanche that follows?
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 222
My godson was no longer a child; he was an adolescent whose balls were
not just ornaments.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 224
`Mutation' is never an explanation; it is simply a name for an observed
fact.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 230
I'm not running down sex; sex is swell, sex is wonderful. But if you
put a holy aura around it [...] sex stops being fun and starts being
neurotic.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 233
Rights is a fictional abstraction. No one has rights; neither machines
nor flesh-and-blood. Persons -- both sorts -- have opportunities, not
rights, which they use, or do not use.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 234
No man owns his genes; he's merely their custodian. They are passed
to him willy-nilly in the meiotic dance; he passes them along to others
through the same blind chances.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 236
I would describe [a time machine] as an unrealized potential. But mythical
implies impossibility.
--Minerva, Time Enough For Love, pg 238
You turned down time travel forward . . . and I ruled out time travel
into the past because you said you wanted something new.
--Minerva, Time Enough For Love, pg 238
A decent hardworking animal should not belong to a lazy bum.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 254
What's ten years? I can hold my breath that long.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 267
Force is an argument to use when nothing else will do and the issue
is that important.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 267
Make money, lose money -- who cares? The idea is to enjoy it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 276
But we don't admit it because when you are outnumbered, it is neither
safe nor comfortable to be a Howard.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 281
[...] Although it is sometimes expedient to make the neighbors think
what you want them to think in order to influence what they do and say
-- and this might be such a time.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 282
Sorry, dear. But there is always a last mistake.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 289
Always take an honour guard with you. If you have to go, go down fighting.
The size of your guard of honour determines your status in Hell.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 293
I'm not `little Dora.' I'm Rangy Lil, the horniest girl south of Separation
-- you said so yourself. I cuss and I swear and I spit between my teeth
and I'm concubine to Lazurus Long, Super Stud of the Stars and better
than any six men -- and you know damned well what I want, and if you
pinch my nipples again, I'm likely to trip you and take it. But I guess
we ought to water the mules.
--Dora Smith nee Brandon, Time Enough For Love, pg 295
Sex is a learned art, as much so as ice skating or tightwire walking
or fancy diving; it is not instinct. Oh, two animals couple by instinct,
but it takes intelligence and patient willingness to turn copulation
into a high and lively art.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 295
But, Minerva, love is what still goes on when you are not horny.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 295
It's no sin not to be pioneer-mother material -- but it is tragic for
both husband and wife to find it out too late.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 298
Patience I have learned. The centuries may not give a man wisdom, but
he acquires patience or he doesn't live through them.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 306
I had to consult her -- but I had to decide. Responsibility cannot be
shared.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 309
The only rule I have about it this: Don't take unnecessary chances.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 312
[...] about raising kids. Praise them, never scream at them, punish
as necessary and right now -- never a moment's delay -- then it's over
with and forget it. Be as lavish with affection after a spanking as
any other time -- or a bit extra.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 316
There is only one dangerous animal, yet at times you're forced to pretend
that he's as sweet and innocent as a cobra.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 318
Durable, three-fourths of any [battle] lies in not hesitating when the
time comes.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 325
... People who don't respect other people's property will do anything
. . . and will steal anything that is not nailed down. Even if they
have no use for it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 326
Such people should be destroyed on sight. The problem is to identify
them.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 326
Perhaps our kids had a weird education . . . but a girl who can shape
a comfortable and handsome saddle starting with a dead mule and not
much else, solve quadratics in her head, shoot straight with gun or
arrow, cook an omelet that is light and tasty, spout page after page
of Shakespeare, butcher a hog and cure it can't be called ignorant by
[pioneer] standards.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 328
I have never understood the gangster mind -- I simply know what to do
about gangsters.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 332
Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow if tomorrow might
improve the odds.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 334
[Pioneer survivors], smart, industrious, tolerant -- willing to fight
when necessary, but not over trivial matters. Sex is not trivial, but
fighting over it is usually pretty silly.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 338
Among such people the plural of spouse is spice.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 339
Bloodshed is not a spectator sport.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 356
I'll go where and when I please, see what I want to -- and try not to
antagonize local yokels. Especially those fighting each other; it makes
them trigger happy.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 357
The historicity of Jesus is the slipperiest question in all history
because for centuries the question couldn't be raised. They would hang
you for asking -- or burn you at the stake.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 357
Naw, just hardnosed. I've never let the privacy custom keep me from
snooping when it suited me.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 369
I designed it to be decadent, Justin. Good plumbing is the finest flower
of decadence and one I have always enjoyed when I could get it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 370
Permit me to say, speaking from experience, all theories are empty.
--Flesh-and-Blood Minerva (Long), Time Enough For Love, pg 371
-- all machinery is animistic -- humanistic, I want to say, but that
term has been preempted. Any machine is a concept of a human designer;
it reflects a human brain, be it a wheelbarrow or giant computer. So
there is nothing mysterious in a machine designed by a human showing
human self-awareness; the mystery lies in awareness itself, wherever
it's found. I used to have a folding camp cot that liked to bite me.
I don't say that it was aware, but I learned to approach it with caution.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 372
I was a bottle baby [...] In consequence I've been looking at tits and
admiring them ever since.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 373
Better to know your resistance than be tripped through ignorance.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 379
And my superiority is never moral; it lies always in doing it first
before he does it to me.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 391
Lazurus, I noticed that you classed `man' as a wild animal --
He is. You can kill him, but you can't tame him. The worst bloodbaths
in history derive from attempting to tame him.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 392
`Savage' describes a cultural condition, not a degree of intelligence.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 393
But space travel can't ease the pressure on a planet grown too crowded
not even with today's ships and probably not with any future ships --
because stupid people won't leave the slopes of their home volcano even
when it starts to smoke and rumble. What space travel does do is drain
off the best brains: those smart enough to see a catastrophe before
it happens and with the guts to pay the price -- abandon home, wealth,
friends, relatives, everything -- and go. That's a tiny fraction of
one percent. But that's enough.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 395
Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small
fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny
fraction who think regularly, accurately, and without self-delusion
-- in the long run these are the only people who count.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 396
-- an irrational attitude I understand, as I am cursed with it myself.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 416
What happened to Neanderthal Man? What happens to any champion when
he's defeated? Justin, what's the point in striving when you're so outclassed
that it's no contest?
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 420
Galahad shows unexpected streaks of nobility. It'll get him killed yet.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 422
Sometimes the best one can do about a weak point is not to call attention
to it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 425
In all matters of government the correct answer is usually: Do nothing
.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 428
-- a time to exercise creative inaction.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 428
The itch to be a worldsaver should not be scratched; it rarely does
any good and can drastically shorten your life.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 428
-- well a man who refuses to take his own death into account in making
plans is a fool. A self-centered fool who does not love anyone.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 432
A pilot who is not a pessimist isn't worth a hoot.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 434
Lazi, you've heard me say nine thousand and nineteen times that we do
not carry weapons to give us Dutch courage. If a gun makes you feel
three meters tall and invulnerable, you had better go unarmed [...]
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 435
We don't shoot cops if there is any way to avoid it. Safer to kiss a
rattlesnake.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 435
Girls, it is hard to shake off any taboos a child is indoctrinated with
in his earliest years. Even if he learns later that they are nonsense.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 445
Whenever the locals rub blue mud in their navels, I rub blue mud in
mine just as solemnly.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 461
Crazy -- a nonscientific term meaning that the person to whom one applies
that label has a world picture differing from the accepted one.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 462
Conscription. I'm durned if I'll try to explain that term to girls who
just barely know what a war is, but it means slave armies --
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 467
(I'm depressing myself -- hindsight is a vice . . . especially when
it is foresight.)
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 469
Alexander Hamilton and Leonardo Da Vinci are in the same boat with you,
to name just two of the many great men entitled to wear the bend sinister.
So stand tall and proud and spit in their eyes.
--Ira Johnson, Time Enough For Love, pg 480
Sin? Sin like love was a word hard to define. It came in two bitter
but vastly different flavors. The first lay in violating the taboos
of your tribe…The other meaning of sin was easier to define because
it was not molded by the murky concepts of religion and taboo: Sin is
behavior that ignores the welfare of others.
--Time Enough For Love, pg 489-490
But -- That was grounded on the assumption that his no-paradoxes theory
was a law of nature. But you've long been aware that the no-paradoxes
theory itself involves a paradox -- one that you've kept quiet about
so as not to alarm Laz and Lor and the rest of your present (that present,
not this one) family; to whit, the idea that free will and pre-destination
are two aspects of the same mathematical truth, and the difference is
merely linguistic, not semantic: the notion that his free will could
not change events here-&-now because his freewill actions here-&-now
were already a part of what had happened in any later here-&-now.
--Time Enough For Love, pg 490
The best thing about the future was that it was unknown. Cassandra's
one good quality was she was never believed.
--Time Enough For Love, pg 507
Never take little bites, enjoy life!
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 509
Son, you are getting old -- why you've been living cautiously.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 510
All nows are equal; that is the basic theorem of time travel.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 562
For a lonely person of either sex, [masturbation] is [a] harmless but
inadequate substitute.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 572
See any [enemy], don't breathe. If they surprise us -- surrender at
once.
`Surrender'?
If you want to be a grandfather. You can't kill an [enemy] patrol all
by your lonesome. Even if you could, it would make so much racket that
their machine guns would chop you in two. Stick close and stay down.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 584
Every animal finds its dieing place.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 585
Morals are your agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules.
To thine own self be true or you spoil the game.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 586
Mary, a committee is the only form of life with a hundred bellies and
no brain.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 24
Mary, if there is anything I have learned in the past couple of centuries,
it's this: These things pass. Wars and Depression and Prophets and Covenants
-- they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 24
He was aware of the present gentle custom against personal weapons,
but he felt naked without them. Such customs were nonsense anyhow, foolishment
from old women -- there was no such thing as a dangerous weapon, there
were only dangerous men.
--Methuselah's Children, pg 27
Wants what he wants when he wants it -- and thinks that constitutes
a natural law.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 49
Bud, you strike me as a clear proof that the Foundation should 'a' bred
for brains instead of age.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 57
Huh? That's impossible!
Yep. So is a baby, Son.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 70
Lazurus knew from hard experience how close under the skin lay lynch
law and mob violence in the most sweetly civilized; . . .
--Methuselah's Children, pg 94
. . . it reminded him of other days, when weather was something experienced
rather than controlled. Life had lost some flavor, in his opinion, when
the weather engineers had learned how to harness the elements.
--Methuselah's Children, pg 118
Go for broke took courage and character that most people didn't have.
Don't grab a toothbrush, don't wind the cat -- just do it!
--Methuselah's Children, pg 128
Free fall nausea, like seasickness, is a joke only to those not affected;
. . .
--Methuselah's Children, pg 140
You are attempting to apply verbal anthropomorphic logic to a field
in which it is not pertinent.
--Andrew Jackson Libby, Methuselah's Children, pg 146
Yeah, yeah, sure, you can't tell the taste till you bite it --
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 147
The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics.
The notion that `Truth will prevail' is merely a pious wish. History
doesn't show it.
--Ralph Shultz, Methuselah's Children, pg 153
A captain puts spine into his ship...or doesn't, as the case may be.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 157
Mary, my sweet, carpe that old diem! -- it's the only game in town.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 216
I've got no more prejudices than the Red Queen. Where does a phone image
go when you cut the circuit?
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 220
`When it don't rain, the roof don't leak; when it rains I cain't fix
it no how.'
--quoted by Andrew Jackson Libby, Methuselah's Children, pg 233
He admitted that he was prejudiced in favor of men. He was a man.
--Methuselah's Children, pg 236
[Lazurus] had claimed publicly that the Families had such great scientific
advantage that they could meet and defeat the best the Earth could offer.
Privately, he knew that this was sophistry and so did any other Member
competent to judge the matter. Knowledge alone did not win wars. The
ignorant fanatics of Europe's Middle Ages had defeated the incomparably
higher Islamic cultures; Archimedes had been struck down by a common
soldier; barbarians had sacked Rome.
--Methuselah's Children, pg 252
Politics. You daren't scare anybody for fear they will squawk.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 269
Ever see a little dog tell a big dog to get the hell out of his yard?
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 273
Between ourselves, I'm not as fast with my fists as I was a century
back.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 275
Lots of capacity and not time enough to use it properly. When it came
to the important questions we might as well have still been monkeys.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 276
There ought not to be anything in the whole universe that man can't
poke his nose into -- that's the way we're built and I assume that there's
some reason for it.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 276
. . . Andy, whatever the answers are, here's one monkey that's going
to keep on climbing, and looking around him to see what he can see,
as long as the tree holds out.
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 276
I have never liked riding the beanstalk. [...] A cable that goes up
into the sky with nothing to hold it up smells too much of magic.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 1
The air felt thick and too warm to breathe; almost at once my clothes
were soggy with sweat; I could feel my feet starting to swell -- and
besides they ached from full gee.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 3
Besides, as my boss says, with all governments everywhere tightening
down on everything wherever they can, with their computers and their
Public Eyes and ninety-nine other sorts of electronic surveillance,
there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever
possible -- keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give
misinformation to computers. Computers are literal-minded and stupid;
electronic records aren't really records . . . so it is good to be alert
to opportunities to foul up the system.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
The key to traveling halfway around a planet without leaving tracks
is: Pay cash. Never credit, never anything that goes into a computer.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
No matter how lavishly overpaid, civil servants everywhere are convinced
that they are horribly underpaid -- but all public employees have larceny
in their hearts or they wouldn't be feeding at the public trough.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
-- A public employee, having no self-respect, needs and demands a show
of public respect.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
I didn't count the fact that the Nairobi Hilton blew up and burned a
few minutes after I took the tube for Mombasa; It would have seemed
downright paranoid to think that it had anything to do with me. [...]
If the opposition wanted to cancel me -- possible but unlikely -- it
would be swatting a fly with an ax to destroy a multimillion crown property
and kill or injure hundreds or thousands of others just to get me. Unprofessional.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
I was taught in basic that no place is ever totally safe and that any
place you habitually return to is your top danger spot, the place most
likely for booby trap, ambush, stakeout.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 8
Hindsight is wonderful -- it shows you how you busted your skull . .
. after you've busted it.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 9
I decided that, with training, he could have been a pro. Nevertheless
he was a bloody amateur and I didn't respect him.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 11
If you are ever questioned under pain, do scream. The Iron Man routine
just makes them worse and it worse. Take it from one who's been there.
Scream your head off and crack as fast as possible.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 14
Clothes? Forget them -- not only did I have no idea where my clothes
might be but also there is no time to stop to dress when you are running
for your life.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 16
. . . any novelty in smuggling becomes useless once word gets around.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 19
Friday, in our profession it is undesirable to hold grudges.
-- Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 22
'Human. All Too Human.' Gossip is a vice.
-- Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 22
When a ship is sinking one does not worry about the dining room linens.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 24
High esteem. When you have never belonged and can never really belong,
words like that mean everything. They warmed me so much that I didn't
mind not being human.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 25
We each have a moral obligation to conserve and preserve beauty in this
world; there is none to waste.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 26
Self-defense sometimes must take the form of 'Do unto others what they
would do unto you but do it first.' De Camp, I believe. Or some other
of the twentieth century school of pessimistic philosophers.
-- Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 27
Friday, one of your weaknesses is that you lack appropriate conceit.
-- Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 28
An honorable hatchet man does not kill by reflex; he kills by planned
intent. If the plan goes so far wrong that he needs to use self-defense,
he is almost certain to become a statistic. In his planned killings,
he always knows why and agrees with the necessity. Or I do not send
him.
-- Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 28
Boss's habitual understatement is such that he would describe the total
destruction of Seattle as a seismic disturbance.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 31
I could walk into a washroom and not be told to use the end stall. But
a phony ID and a fake family tree do not keep you warm; they just keep
you from being hassled and discriminated against. You are still aware
that there isn't any nation anywhere that considers your sort fit for
citizenship and there are lots of places that would deport you or even
kill you -- or sell you -- if your cover-up ever slipped.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 32
'Birthright.' Don't make jokes, Boss; you have no talent for it. 'My
mother was a test tube; my father was a knife.'
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 36
It isn't any one thing; it's a million little things that are the difference
between being reared as a human child and being raised as an animal.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 36
Friday, don't despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool,
merit or demerit lies in how it is used.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 37
Friday, brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real
value. Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger
to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving
the stupid ones in place. It took only a few careful 'accidents' to
ruin utterly the great Prussian military machine and turn it into a
blundering mob. But this did not show until the fighting was well under
way, because stupid fools look just as good as military geniuses until
the fighting starts.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 37
I like to ride the semi-ballistics -- a high gee blastoff that always
feels as if the cradle would rupture and spurt fluid all over the cabin,
the breathless minutes in free fall that feel as if your guts were falling
out, and then reentry and that long, long glide that beats any sky ride
ever built. Where can you have more fun in forty minutes with your clothes
on?
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 39
It is with deep sorrow that we pause to announce the total destruction
of Acapulco. This flash comes to you courtesy of Interworld Transport
Proprietary . . .
-- Friday, pg 42
. . . there is not yet a truly lovely city off Earth. Luna City is underground,
Ell Five looks like a junkyard from outside and has only one arc that
looks good from inside. Martian cities are mere hives, and most Earth
cities suffer from a misguided attempt to look like Los Angeles.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 44
Very nice. But my mind's made up.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 46
Properly regarded, male vanity is a virtue, not a vice. Treated correctly,
it makes him enormously pleasanter to deal with.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 47
You don't know any better. You've never been anywhere and you probably
soaked up racism with your mother's milk.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 57
I'm not sure how the subject of artificial persons got into the discussion.
I think it was while Vickie was proving still another time how free
she was from racial prejudice while exhibiting that irrational attitude
every time she opened her mouth.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 59
We have to find loopholes like that to avoid being persecuted by the
ignorant and the prejudiced.
Meaning that I'm ignorant and prejudiced?
Meaning that you are a sweet girl who was fed a pack of lies by her
elders. I'm trying to correct that. But if the shoe fits you can lie
in it.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 61
In dealing with the law and with people I have found a vast difference
between 'should' and 'is.'
--Brian Davidson; Friday, pg 64
Bare feet are as provocative as bare breasts, although most people do
not seem to know it. A female packaged only in a lava-lava is far more
provocative than one totally nude.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 72
Being creche raised, I can never know enough about human manners and
etiquette but I do know that a woman guest must dress -- or undress
-- to match her hostess.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 75
Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man
in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 77
Man o' mine, you don't 'got' to do nothing except pay taxes and die.
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 87
(What would you have us do, Ian? Cut our throats? We didn't ask to be
produced any more than you asked to be born. We may not be human but
we share the age-old fate of humans; we are strangers in world we never
made.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 88
A computer can become self-aware -- oh certainly! Get it up to human
level of complication and it has to become self-aware. Then it discovers
that it is not human. Then it figures out that it can never be human;
all it can do is sit there and take orders from humans. Then it goes
crazy.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 93
One might almost define intelligence as the level at which an aware
organism demands 'what's in it for me?'
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 94
From their expressions and thoughtful nods I saw that my hosts and hostess
agreed with most of the choices [for assassination]. The deputy to the
Prime Minister was on the list but not the Prime Minister herself --
to my surprise and perhaps more so to hers. How would you feel if you
had spent your whole life in politics, scrambled all the way to the
top, then some smart yabber comes along and says you aren't even important
enough to kill? A bit like being covered up by a cat!
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 96
(What is truth? asked Pontius Pilate and washed his hands. I had no
answers so I kept quiet.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 97
If the horse can't jump the hurdle, shoot the horse. Keep on doing this
and eventually you will find a horse that can clear the jump -- if you
don't run out of horses. This is the sort of plausible pseudologic that
most people bring to political affairs. It causes one to wonder if mankind
is capable of being well governed by any system of government.
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 97
Government is a dirty business.
True. But assassination is even dirtier.
--George Perrault in reply to Ian Tormey; Friday, pg 97
They carried the 'stink of piety' too. I got downwind of them once,
then moved quickly.
--Ian Tormey; Friday, pg 101
Brother, I am not joking; I am weeping. One gang plans to shoot me on
sight, another merely outlaws my art and profession, while the third
by threatening without specifying is, so it seems to me, even more to
be dreaded. Meanwhile, lest I find comfort simply in physical sanctuary,
this beneficent government, my lifetime alma mater, declares me enemy
alien fit only to be penned. What shall I do? Joke? Or drip tears on
your neck.?
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 105
One thing every woman knows but few men ever learn is that there are
times when the only wise course of action is not to act but to wait.
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 105
I know you two. Both of you would like to run down to the recruiting
office, enlist for the duration, and thereby turn your consciences over
to the sergeants. This served your fathers and grandfathers, and I am
truly sorry that it can't serve you.
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 105
Don't be noble, dear, it doesn't suit you.
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 106
What's the point in saving her life if you turn her over to a sex-crazed
Canuck?
--Ian Tormey; Friday, pg 106
Although that body would not be dead if its owner were smart enough
to pour pee out of a boot.
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 110
She is about as tender-hearted as a Medici.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 111
My brother, one should never tempt one of the dear ones to lie.
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 116
I don't argue with lasers; you can neither bribe them nor sweet-talk
them --
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 117
Why do men with little souls have to have big weapons?
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 120
The coldest depth of Hell is reserved for people who abandon kittens.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 123
This 'human' and 'not-human' dichotomy is something thought up by ignorant
laymen; everybody in the profession knows that it is nonsense. Your
genes are human genes; they have been most carefully selected. Perhaps
that makes you superhuman, it can't make you non-human.
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 133
It takes a human mother to bear a human baby. Don't ever forget that.
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 133
My second impression was that he was even homelier than pictures, cartoons,
and terminal images showed him to be -- and that opinion stayed. Like
many a politico before him, Tumbril had turned a distinctive, individual
ugliness into a political asset.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 148
As may be, Warwhoop Tumbril looked like a frog trying to be a toad and
just missing.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 149
There you are. Everybody is Equal, and Everybody has a vote. But you
have to draw the line somewhere. Now shut-up, damnit, and don't interrupt
while your betters are talking.
-- Warwhoop Tumbril; Friday, pg 149
I'm not upset by co-ed plumbing -- after all, I was raised in a creche
-- but I have noticed that men and women, given a chance to segregate,
do segregate.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 151
The simplest sort [of code] and thereby impossible to break. The first
ad told the person or persons concerned to carry out number seven or
expect number seven or it said something about something designated
as seven. This one says the same with respect to code item number ten.
But the meaning of the numbers cannot be deduced through statistical
analysis because the code can be changed long before a useful statistical
universe can be reached. It's an idiot code, Friday, and an idiot code
can never be broken if the user has the good sense not to go too often
to the well.
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 163
It is not written in the stars that I will always understand what is
going on -- a truism that I often find damnably annoying.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 165
I did not offer to pay the Hunters. There are human people who have
very little but are rich in dignity and self-respect. Their hospitality
is not for sale, nor is their charity. I am slowly learning to recognize
this trait in human people who have it. In the Hunters it was unmistakable.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 178
I went back to the fence while concluding that Hannah Jensen was not
a lady. She had no excuse to be rude to the Greenies merely because
they were unspeakably vile. Even black widows, body lice, and hyenas
have to make a living although I could never see why.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 185
I do not kill everyone with whom I have a difference of opinion and
I would not want anyone reading this memoir to think that I do.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 186
. . . started using my brain instead. That's harder work than using
muscles but it's quieter and burns fewer calories. It's the only thing
that separates us from the apes, although just barely.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 192
But a credit card is an insidious thing -- just a cheap little piece
of plastic . . . that can equate to great stacks ofgold bullion. It
was up to me to protect that card personally and at any cost, until
I could place it in Janet's hand. Nothing else was honest.
A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards
a person has no privacy . . . or at best protects her privacy only with
great effort and much chicanery. Besides that, do you ever know what
the computer network is doing when you poke your card into a slot? I
don't. I feel much safer with cash. I've never heard of anyone who had
much luck arguing with a computer.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 195
It seems to me that credit cards are a curse. But I'm not human and
probably lack the human viewpoint (in this as in so many, many other
things.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 195
How many people have died because they could not abandon their baggage?
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 195
An artificial person never understands human people's sexual codes;
all we can do is memorize them and try to stay out of trouble. But this
isn't easy; human sexual codes are as contorted as a plate of spaghetti.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 197
I was taught in crèche to class coition with eating, drinking,
breathing, sleeping, playing, talking, cuddling – the pleasant
necessities that make life a happiness instead of a burden.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 198
If I want a man to refrain from discussing my sweaty clumsiness in bed,
the only solution is to stay out of bed with him.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 200
Female tears are reputed to be a powerful aphrodisiac to most men and
your own experience bears that out. (Crypto-sadism? Machismo? Who cares?
It works.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 206
No matter who or what, a box of flowers is better than a slap in the
belly with a wet fish.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 206
Human people are so cocksure that they can always spot an AP -- blah!
We can't even spot each other.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 207
Who is too sensitive? You are Friday.
But damn it, most humans do discriminate against our sort. Kick a dog
often enough and he becomes awfully jumpy.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 208
All right, you're tentatively you. But if you're not, I'll make a small
bet with you that you won't live past the next checkpoint. Mr. Two-Canes
is reputed to be unamused by gatecrashers.
--Gloria Tomosawa; Friday, pg 210
Stop the stupid talk; it ill befits a genius.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 214
Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on
everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 214
Friday, a well run tyranny is a better base for my work than is any
form of free government. But a well run tyranny is almost as scarce
as an efficient democracy.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 216
Huh?
Don't grunt; it is not pleasing in a young woman.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 218
German is unsuited to lyricism, so much so that translations fall sweeter
on the ear than do the German originals. This is no fault of Goethe
or Heine; it is a defect of an ugly language.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 222
Fooey! I had wandered into a funny farm and was locked up with the inmates.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 226
I was tempted to spend the next three hours in lotus chanting my beads.
But I have a deep conviction that one should not attend the End of the
World without a good breakfast . . .
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 226
Friday, your greatest weakness is your lack of awareness of your true
strength.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 227
Wouldn't we look silly if we depended on the professional analysts but
the outbreak was one year earlier, as you predicted? Catastrophe. But
to be a year early in taking prophylactic measures does no harm.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 227
[...] In the third place, from the strictest humanitarian viewpoint,
any attempt to stop the process by which overcrowded cities purge themselves
is not a kindness. Plague is a nasty death but a quick one. Starvation
also is a nasty death . . . but a very slow one.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 227
(Ridiculous! Any government public health department, faced with such
a question, would set up a blue-ribbon study group, insist on ample
research funds, and schedule a reasonable time -- five years or more
-- for orderly scientific investigation.) I answered at once, . . .
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 227
Boss, killing a rat is no problem. Stuff it into a sack. Beat the sack
with an ax. Then shoot it. Then drown it. Burn the sack with the dead
rat in it. Meanwhile its mate has raised another litter of pups and
you now have a dozen rats to replace it.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 228
Piffle. Soft-headed nonsense. Friday, you overstress the human will
to die. We have had the means to commit racial suicide for generations
now and those means are and have been in many hands. We have not done
so. In the second place, to replace us, rats would have to grow enormously
larger skulls, develop bodies to support them, learn to walk on two
feet, develop their front paws into delicate manipulative organs --
and grow more cortex to control all this. To replace man another breed
must become man. Bah. Forget it.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 228
Boss, there ain't no such animal as a well-documented conspiracy. Or
sometimes too well documented but the documents contradict each other.
If a conspiracy happened quite some time ago, a generation or longer,
it becomes impossible to establish the truth. Have you ever heard of
a man named John Fitzgerald Kennedy?…Killed in front of hundreds
of witnesses and every aspect, before, during, and after, heavily documented.
All that mountain of evidence adds up to is this: Nobody knows who shot
him, how many shot him, how many times he was shot, who did it, why
it was done, and who was involved in the conspiracy if there was a conspiracy.
It isn't even possible to say whether the murder plot was foreign or
domestic.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 229
All that can truthfully be said is that the people who come out on top
write the official versions found in the history books, history that
is no more honest than is autobiography.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 229
Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 230
When I was younger, I thought I could change this world. Now I no longer
think so but for emotional reasons I must keep on fighting a holding
action.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 230
Friday, you are developing a bureaucratic mind. 'Job title' indeed!
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 231
Friday, you are well aware that the absence of Eyes and Ears today simply
means that they are concealed.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 231
Study it yourself. If I told you, you would not know; you would simply
have been told. Study it thoroughly and some night -- when you are sleeping
alone -- I will ask you. You will answer and then you will know. --Dr.
Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 231
Those who spoke of energy scarcity and of conserving energy simply did
not understand the situation. The sky was raining soup; what was needed
was a bucket to carry it.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 234
The people's right to know -- the people's right to know what? [...]
In this case the trouble with the people's right to know is that it
strongly resembles the right of someone to be a concert pianist -- but
who does not want to practice.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 236
But I am prejudiced, not being human and never having had any rights.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 236
What are the marks of a sick culture?
It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves
with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group.
Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole
population.
A very bad sign. Particularism. It was once considered a Spanish vice
but any country can fall sick with it.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 240
So far as I have listened, before a revolution can take place, the population
must lose faith in both the police and the courts.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 240
It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced
weakens all other laws.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 241
Boss, laws to sweep back the tide never do work; that's what King Canute
was saying.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 241
Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named . .
. but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners.
Lack of consideration for other in minor matters. A loss of politeness,
of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 242
Friday, it is too late to save this culture -- this worldwide culture,
. . . Therefore we must now prepare the monasteries for the coming Dark
Age. Electronic records are too fragile; we must again have books, of
stable inks and resistant paper. But that may not be enough. The reservoir
for the next renaissance may have to come from beyond the sky.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 242
He didn't feel sorry for himself, he didn't feel sorry for me, and he
scolded me more than once for self-pity. Self-pity, he said, is the
most demoralizing of all vices.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 244
Then I reminded myself that Boss would not have liked me at all if I
had been a worm, subservient, no opinions of my own.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 244
Burt, don't ever tackle a lawyer with your hands. The way to fight a
lawyer is with another lawyer, a smarter one.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 250
Assassination is usually a dirty business . . . but honorable hatchet
men can be heroes.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 251 (posthumous letter)
A perfect result derives from a willingness to discard any attempt less
than perfect.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 251 (posthumous letter)
A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive
anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not
for the strong -- and you are strong. The great trouble with religion
-- any religion -- is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions
by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One
may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty
of reason -- but one cannot have both.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 253 (posthumous letter)
I don't see anything wrong with crying; it lubricates the psyche.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 253
I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend
their efforts making life easy for other people -- and parasites.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 257
Sex is a better tranquilizer than any of those drugs and much better
for your metabolism.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 257
I don't see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn't
anything complex; it is simply the best thing in life, even better than
food.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 257
Las Vegas is a three-ring circus with a hangover.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 260
Income tax? What a filthy suggestion! I could not believe my ears.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 260
I never did think well of Anna's plans to become a professional grandmother;
that's a form of suicide. --Sylvia (Goldie) Havensisle; Friday, pg 270
Boss had hinted that I might be some sort of superman -- if so, I can
testify that there is very little demand for supermen.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 274
Is any of this in the company brochures? Hollow laugh!
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 284
I do hope I grow up before Cheyne-Stokes breathing sets in.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 285
A secret just a bit broached is like a girl just a little bit pregnant.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 294
That sounds like a violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy. I
was brought up to bathe regularly and to believe that There Ain't No
Such Thing As A Free Lunch; I told him so.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 294
However, Miss Rich Bitch is not required to be bright.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 304
They are very old, very rich, and extremely self-centered -- save for
a bare handful who have managed to grow old without turning sour.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 304
(Life-as-we-don't-know-it is a fascinating subject but has nothing to
do with colonization by Earth people.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 318
But I would as lief miss Armageddon.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 319
But a spy is not entitled to the friendly consideration that a servant
always rates.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 320
How can anyone get to be seventy years (she was at least that) without
knowing that no one decided to settle on Outpost . . . except in the
limited sense that one decides to accept transportation as the only
alternative to death or life imprisonment.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 322
I thought that pregnancy tests today were service-while-you-wait?
Get along with you. Your great-grandmother used to find out through
her waistband becoming too tight. You're spoiled.
--Dr. Jerry Madsen; Friday, pg 323
The trouble with this sort of mission is that, after an agent has successfully
completed it, something permanent happens to that agent, something that
keeps him from talking, then or later. So, no matter how lavish the
fee, it is well to avoid this class of mission.
--From a basic training lecture by Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg
325
If you don't believe that such things can happen, we aren't living in
the same world and there is no point in your reading any more of this
memoir. Throughout history the conventional way of dealing with an awkward
witness has been to arrange for him to stop breathing.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 329
The closest the Forward ever gets to a planet is its stationary orbit
-- for Botany Bay that is about thirty-five thousand kilometers. That's
a long way to go in some very thin vacuum.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 329
I had seen a face behind a full beaver -- meaning I hadn't seen it.
Put a full beard on a man and all you see is the shredded wheat.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 339
There is a lot of obsolete engineering that is still useful in the colonies
. . .
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 341
Pete, if you are trying to sweet talk me into untying you, you are barking
down the wrong well.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 343
People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy
living.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 353
I think that's all anybody wants. To belong. To be people.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 357
My old man taught me two things: Mind own business and Always cut cards.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 7
Am not going to argue whether a machine can really be alive, really
be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt
it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? I don't know about you, tovarishch,
but I am. Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human
brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically
whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational
paths. Can't see it matters whether paths are protein or platinum.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 8
This playful pocket of negative entropy . . .
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 8
Yapping had same significance as squeals of kittens in a box. Oh, some
wardens listened and other wardens tried to suppress it but added up
same either way -- null program.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 16
Tourist often remark on how polite everybody is in Luna -- with unstated
comment that ex-prison shouldn't be so civilized. Having been Earthside
and see what they put up with, I know what they mean. But useless to
tell them we are what we are because bad actors don't live long -- in
Luna.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 17
We are, eh? How? Everybody does business with Authority for same reason
everybody does business with Law of Gravitation. Going to change that
too?
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 19
A woman was ejected politely -- not politely on her part; she made coarse
remarks about ejectors. I was embarrassed.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 19
One first thing learned about Luna, back with first shiploads of convicts,
was that zero pressure was place for good manners. Bad-tempered straw
boss didn't last many shifts; had an accident -- and top bosses learned
not to pry into accidents or they met accidents too.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 20
Wonderful she had been, at swaying crowd. But oratory is null program.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 23
Three million, unarmed and helpless -- and eleven billion of them .
. . with ships and bombs and weapons. We could be a nuisance -- but
how long will papa take it before baby gets spanked?
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 23
As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 23
Comrades, harken to me! Every load you ship to Terra condemns your grandchildren
to slow death. The miracle of photosynthesis, the plant-and-animal cycle,
is a closed cycle. You have opened it -- and your lifeblood runs downhill
to Terra.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 25
If I ever marry again -- unlikely but I'm not opposed to it -- it would
be just one man, a tight little marriage, earthworm style. Oh, I don't
mean I would keep him dogged down. I don't think it matters where a
man eats lunch as long as he comes home for dinner.
--Wyoming Knott, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 32
You're a pessimist.
Nyet, realist. Never pessimist. Too much Loonie not to bet if any chance.
Show me chances no worse than ten to one against and I'll go for broke.
But want that one chance in ten.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis to Wyoming Knott, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress,
pg 36
…don't care when world ends long as I'm bathed and in clean clothes.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 36
When a man dies, doesn't shock me too much; we get death sentences day
we are born. But Mike was unique and no reason not to be immortal. Never
mind souls -- prove Mike did not have one. And if no soul so much worse.
No? Think twice.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 44
Girls are interesting, Mike; they can reach conclusions with even less
data than you can.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 49
Senorita, the day I let politics interfere with my appreciation of beauty,
that day I retire from politics.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 54
Manuel, the life of a conspirator is not an easy one and I learned before
you were born not to mix provender and politics. Disturbs the gastric
enzymes and leads to ulcers, the occupational disease of the underground.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 55
And that, senorita, is the weakness of our Cause. Communications. Those
goons were not important -- but crucially important is that it lay with
the Warden, not with us, to decide whether the story should be told.
To a revolutionist, communications are a sine-qua-non.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 58
Terror! A man can face known danger. But the unknown frightens him.
We disposed of those finks, teeth and toenails, to strike terror into
their mates. Nor do I know how many effectives the Warden has, but I
guarantee the are less effective today. Their mates went out on an easy
mission. Nothing come back.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 58
The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally. When the
number is as high as four, chances are even that one is a spy.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 59
I'm a rational anarchist. [...] A rational anarchist believes that concepts
such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save
as physically exemplified in the acts of self- responsible individuals.
He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute
blame . . . as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place
inside human beings singly and nowhere else . But being rational, he
knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tried to
live perfectly in an imperfect world . . . aware that his effort will
be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 64
Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 65
Revolution is art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve.
Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying
as a victory.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 66
People do not realize how precarious our ecology is. Even so, it shocks
me. I know water runs downhill . . . but didn't dream how terribly soon
it would reach bottom.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 74
A revolutionist must keep his mind free of worry or the pressure becomes
intolerable.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 78
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 79
Killing is not the way to handle a spy, not when he doesn't know that
you know that he is a spy.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 80
But I was surprised that I had a record, too -- routine check made when
I was cleared to work in Authority Complex. Was classed as non-political
and someone had added not too bright which was both unkind and true
or why would I get mixed up in revolution.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 81
Never tease an old dog. He might still have one more bite.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 82
Like a perfect dinner, a revolution has to cooked so that everything
comes out even.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 141
Hard to coerce a man who faints if he gets overexcited.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 186
Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional ... for in the past mankind
has not done well when saddling itself with governments.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 241
You might even consider installing the candidates who receive the least
number of votes; unpopular men may be just the sort to save you from
a new tyranny. Don't reject the idea merely because it seems preposterous
-- think about it! In past history popularly elected governments have
been no better and sometimes worse than overt tyrannies.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 241
-- the more impediment to legislation the better.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 242
You have put your finger on the dilemma of all government -- and the
reason I am an anarchist. The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits;
it contains until it destroys.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 243
It may not be possible to do away with government -- sometimes I think
government is an inescapable disease of human beings.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 243
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 3
Jill, a government is a living organism. Like every living thing its
prime characteristic is the instinct to survive. You hit it, it fights
back.
--Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 35
Gadflies are necessary. But it's well to look at the new rascals before
you turn your present rascals out.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 185
Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is
that it's eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is
that its leaders reflect their constituents -- a low level, but what
can you expect?
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 185
Cruise ships have the best food and, all too often, the worst conversation
in the world.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 2
He's damned by his own I.Q. -- leave him to nature.
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 353
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