115 quotes
When the Everywhere couple crack a joke
It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk.
When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose
It's the with-it view as everyone knows.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Whatever my country and whatever my name
A gadget on the set makes me think the same.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
At night, when he lay down to sleep, he felt that his brain was resonating with the heartbeat of the planet.
The Sheep Look Up (1972)
He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one’s acts destroyed.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
COINCIDENCE You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
If you kill a dozen people by sniping at them from a roof-top, you’re a criminal. Unless you had a uniform on. Then you get a medal.
The Stone That Never Came Down (1973)
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
The Sheep Look Up (1972)
Now, listen. Marriage is binding as a civil contract, but it has—like all my favorite contracts—an escape clause. I make my living by spotting them.
Time-Jump (1973)
How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Let's all be different same as me.
The Shockwave Rider (1975)
Cham Loc knew little of affairs of state, but he was aware that whenever politicians talked about matters of inflexible principle, life was scheduled to become even more difficult that usual.
Who Steals My Purse (1973)
A cripple can still be a person, but in what sense is a lunatic human? Humanity’s in the mind, in the tangle of thoughts spun by the brain, and once that’s gone what remains is human only in outward shape.
Quicksand (1967)
Damn it, man: anyone who can treat another human being as an object for target practice is stuck even further back in the infantile stage than somebody who’s frightened to move on from the masturbation phase and go to bed with a girl!
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
Well-intentioned men don’t run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
Faust felt like this. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come and Faustus must be damned … How long did he buy with the currency of his soul — ten years?
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
LEADERSHIP A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it’ll be someone else’s bones which go crack and not their own.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)