18 quotes
What a strange thing then is this great civilization, that no sooner have men attained it than they seek to flee from it!
Earth Abides (1949)
People certainly tended to overestimate the intelligence of dogs!
Earth Abides (1949)
“Oh, don’t worry,” he thought, putting it into words, “there never had been perfection yet, and it certainly isn’t going to start now for me.”
Earth Abides (1949)
How then, once overthrown, shall this great civilization, except by renewed Forces and Pressures, ever come again?
Earth Abides (1949)
In any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under.
Earth Abides (1949)
What you were preparing against—that never happened! All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid.
Earth Abides (1949)
Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization.
Earth Abides (1949)
To think of that as something bad was merely to think in terms of what had once been and no longer existed.
Earth Abides (1949)
There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: “The noise-producing animal.”
Earth Abides (1949)
The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later.
Earth Abides (1949)
Firearms were as likely to create as to solve difficulties.
Earth Abides (1949)
Yes, he realized, if a man began to think of himself as divinely appointed, he was close to thinking of himself as God—and at that point lay insanity.
Earth Abides (1949)
Men go and come, but earth abides.
Earth Abides (1949)
“It has never happened!” cannot be construed to mean, “It can never happen!”—as well say, “Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,” or “Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.”
Earth Abides (1949)
“There are no atheists in foxholes,” he remembered, but the whole world now was nothing but a huge foxhole! But certainly what had happened did not inspire one to think that God was particularly interested in the human race, or in its individuals.
Earth Abides (1949)
What would be the use of all these books now? Why worry about one of them? Why worry about all the millions of them? There was no one left, now, to carry on. Books themselves, mere wood pulp and lampblack, were nothing—without a mind to use them.
Earth Abides (1949)
It was all tied up in that same old question. How much did man strike outward to affect all his surroundings and how much did the surroundings press in upon him? Did the Napoleonic Age produce Napoleon or did he produce it?
Earth Abides (1949)
A dead cat, it seemed, lay on the counter, but as he looked, it stirred to life and he realized that it had merely been lying, after the the habit of cats, in such a position that it looked dead. The cat looked at him with a kind of cold effrontery, as the duchess at the chambermaid. Ish felt uncomfortable, and had to remind himself that this was the way cats had always behaved.
Earth Abides (1949)