22 quotes
The face of danger is brightest when turned so its features cannot be seen.
The cat didn’t answer, except possibly by not answering.
The Mind Thing (1961)
“Nuts,” said the Martian. “You people got rocks in your heads, that’s what accounts for your superstitions.”
Martians, Go Home (1955)
A lot of my childhood playmates ended up behind bars and I don’t mean as bartenders.
The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953)
Her life, except for reading, had been dull—but it had not been in vain.
The Mind Thing (1961)
“Are you interested in science?”
“Of course I am. Who isn’t?”
The Mind Thing (1961)
He could see now what a lot of his mistakes had been—laziness among them. And laziness is curable.
What Mad Universe (1949)
A new racket, probably. A depression breeds rackets as a swamp breeds mosquitoes.
Martians, Go Home (1955)
It’s indecent and inhuman to put full length mirrors in bathroom doors. They cause narcissism in the young and unhappiness in the old.
The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953)
Yes, it was swell to sleep when you were looking forward to something. Time flies by and you don’t even hear the rustle of its wings.
He had been cheated out of his compensation, on a technicality, by the corrupt officialdom of the spaceways. He’d turned criminal then, and had been as ruthless to society as it had been to him.
Gateway to Glory (1950)
Well, let’s call his age as pushing sixty and not mention from which direction he was pushing it.
Bad, I thought, looking around me, that I’d accumulated so much. A man should never own more stuff than he can carry in his hands at a dead run. It was bad, but it had happened.
The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953)
The ever-present possibility of making a big mistake worried him.
He’d have worried about it more if he’d known that he already had.
What Mad Universe (1949)
“One may think,” said the professor, “of an absolute as a mode of being—”
Yeah, thought Shorty McCabe, one may think of anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache.
I want men who, like you, would not take orders even if I should give them. I do not want to be a god, Crag, even though I have some powers beyond mankind’s; I would not let my new world be colonized by people who might even be tempted to obey me.
Rogue in Space (1957)
I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind.
The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953)
Strangely, he wasn’t scared at all. He was even more coldly calm, calmly analytical. And he knew that he would have to be if he was to stand a chance to win this war. If he was to win it, his mind would have to be his major weapon; firearms might win a battle, but never the war.
The Mind Thing (1961)
Paranoia is a form of insanity which, Dr. Randoph told me, hasn’t any physical symptoms. It’s just a delusion supported by a systematic framework of rationalization. A paranoiac can be sane in every way except one.
In twenty to thirty thousand years memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the wind, the rain and the jungle erode and cover stone. The contours of the very continents change—and glaciers come and go, and a city of twenty thousand years before is under miles of earth or miles of water.