Clifford D. Simak quotes - page 3

They're just ordinary people,” Nancy said. "You can't expect too much of them. (Clifford D. Simak)
Where would one find an answer? For the belief-the will to believe-was engrained deeply in the human fiber. Not entirely, either, in the matrix of the present situation, but in the blood and bone of Man clear back to the caves. There was in the soul of Man a certain deadly fascination with all things macabre. The situation as it stood had been grasped willingly, almost eagerly, by men for whom the world had become a rather tame and vapid place with no terror in it beyond the brute force terror of atomic weapons and the dread uncertainty of unstable men in power. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
Propaganda,” Trevor said. "Let's call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
They'd lived all their life on Earth; they knew nothing but the Earth. They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was not really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that could make one's hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
In those villages, he wondered, how much ability and genius might be lying barren, ability and genius that the world could use but would never know because of the intolerance and hate which was held against the very people who were least qualified as the targets of it. And the pity of it was that such hate and such intolerance would never have been born, could never have existed, had it not been for men like Finn-the bigots and the egomaniacs; the harsh, stern Puritans; the little men who felt the need of power to lift them from their smallness. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
It was not his fight. Not personally his fight. No more his fight than any one of them. But he had made it his. Because of Stone, because of Rand and Harriet, because of priest who'd hounded him across half the continent, he had tried to make a fight of it. And perhaps, as well, because of something undefinable, unknown to himself, unsuspected in himself-some crazy idealism, some deep-rooted sense of justice, some basic aversion to bullies and bigots and reformers. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
The past, he said. The past is too much with me. And the past has made me useless. I have too much to remember-so much to remember that it becomes more important than the things there are to do. I'm living in the past and that is no way to live. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
He knew that there was death-that there must be death if there were evolution, that death was one of the mechanisms that biologically spelled progress and advancement for evolutionary species. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
There have been moments when I also wasn't able to attach as much importance to football as it seemed to me I should. (Clifford D. Simak)
These people must be helped to find themselves in this new world, but they must not know that they're being helped. To let them know would destroy confidence and dignity, and human dignity is the keystone of any civilization. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
Individualists would have little use for a device which would make them understand one another, for they would not care whether they understood one another. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of sorrow-a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die? View quote
Clifford D. Simak
It's a wonder to me,” said Adams sourly, "that you don't simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
They would fail. We would always fail. We weren't built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn't change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we traveled. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
There was a comfort in the thought, a strange sort of personal comfort in being able to believe that some intelligence might have solved the riddle of that mysterious equation of the universe. And how, perhaps, that mysterious equation might tie in with the spiritual force that was idealistic brother to time and space and all those other elemental factors that held the universe together. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
Accident, he wondered, or a way of hiding? Trapped or planned? He had no way of knowing and further speculation was ridiculous, based as it necessarily must be upon earlier assumptions that were entirely without support. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
He sat and watched them come and he thought of going in to get a rifle, but he didn't stir from his seat upon the steps. The rifle would do no good, he told himself. It would be a senseless thing to get it; more than that, a senseless attitude. The least that man could do, he thought, was to meet these creatures of another world with clean and empty hands. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart. (Clifford D. Simak)
The red thought rose up inside Blaine's brain: Why not kill him now? For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
It wouldn't be the truth,” said Sutton. "That,” said Trevor, "doesn't have a thing to do with it. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
The party was beginning to get noisy-not boisterous, but noisy. It was beginning to acquire that stale air of futility to which, in the end, all parties must fall victim. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres. View quote
Clifford D. Simak