18 quotes
It’s common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side rather than theirs.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
Like all neo-puritans you have a mind like an open drain.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
His brief and frustrating dialogue with them had convinced him that they must divide the human race into three categories: staff, patients and potential patients.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
The sound of a code being broken is usually the same as that of somebody snapping his fingers.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
If “media” is the plural of “medium” the question is: how many of them are fraudulent?
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
Even though he wasn’t entirely convinced of the truth of what he was saying, the fact of saying it was curiously reassuring to his mind.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
It’s okay to be a responsible member of society if only you know what you’re going to be held responsible for.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don’t know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
The sound of shutters going up around her mind, armored against anything short of a nuke, was very nearly audible in the room.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
It was a great image, especially for areas where there was strong Muslim influence and the concomitant view prevailed that women had no souls.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
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)
So what shape was the world in this morning? Even flatter than yesterday.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hogwash about students at college having to be treated as adults—there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
It was his hope and ambition to cause many deaths. He was an arms salesman by choice, calm and even a little happy to see his products in such demand, capable of trying to clinch a sale at the bedside of a fresh corpse.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
She was on a pediflow, and—like so many of the devices which twenty-first century ingenuity had made available to mankind—that was something which seemed to have been destined for an altogether more rational species than the one she belonged to.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
Another of their damnable promotions, presumably! It was the regular Gottschalk technique: select an area where sales were below average, saturate it with rumors until someone’s temper reached the breaking point and the inevitable division occurred into blank and kneeblank, and then the following day take advantage of people’s frayed nerves to sell guns, grenades and mines.
The Jagged Orbit (1969)