20 quotes
If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
When Holy Church occasionally hinted that she still considered her authority to be supreme over all nations and superior to the authority of states, men in these times tended to snicker.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
The image of those cool green eyes lingered with him as long as life.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
He had never seen a "Fallout," and he hoped he'd never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
One never knows whether the Poet is speaking fact, fancy, or allegory. If fancy is clever enough, I doubt that the Poet would admit a difference between fancy and fact.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
He had seen primal innocence in those eyes, and a promise of resurrection.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
When mass murder’s been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not obey.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
She watched him with cool green eyes and smiled innocently. The eyes were alert with wonder, curiosity, and — perhaps something else — but she could apparently not see that he was in pain.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Reasoning which touches experimental reality nowhere is the business of angelologists and theologians, not of physical scientists. And yet such papers as these describe systems which touch our experience nowhere. Were they within the experimental reach of the ancients?
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. You don't have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
"Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
It was more than reflexive imitation, he decided. She was trying to communicate something. By the repetition, she was trying to convey the idea: I am somehow like you.
But she had only just now been born.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)