Quotes from Fritz Leiber

Don't follow it, I say. It leads only to squidgy death.

chess fir-ma-ment. Morphy, Angler, Judy Kaplan....

He'd said that same day to Fani that a practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a sacrifice for others' welfare.

I think when more men get out among the stars, people are going to realize that we can't afford to think of ourselves as anything other than citizens of Mother Earth. In the face of the universe, of Moonmen, of the inhabitants of the millions of other planets that must exist, our national differences seem so small, so much a private family matter as not to be thrashed out in the public of our interstellar neighbors. I think it's good we are brothers. All men are brothers.

He'd said that same day to Fani that a practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a sacrifice for others' welfare. He began to suspect, now, that the welfare of others can often coincide with one's own.

You have about as much chance as a starving Ukrainian kulak now that Moscow's clapped on the interdict.

For the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart.

I'm resigned to living in a chess-type universe—few and simple rules, but infinite combinations of them.

Look deeply as I have into the gas-lit faces in the streets around us, in the streets of any American city, and you will see a carefully dissembled maniacal hatred, a hooded yet furnace-red glare—

The Mouser glared at the old man where he sat perched on the stool like some ungainly plucked foul.

THE MAD ROBOT, by William P. McGivern Originally published in Amazing Stories, January 1944. CHAPTER I Rick Weston arrived at the Earth space-port outside Greater New York at six o'clock in the morning. He was driven directly to the mooring tower where his slim, fast pursuit single-seater was being readied for his trip to Jupiter

The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.

There had been raised eyebrows at these arrangements from the rather strait-laced Islers, which the four principals had handled by firmly overlooking them.

The spirit, alas, is not the same thing as the consciousness and one may lose–sacrifice– the first and still be burdened with the second.

Ha-ha, joke. Gussy, it achieves the same effect without using any dope at all. Listen: a tickler reminds you of your duties and opportunities—your chances for happiness and success! What's the obvious next step?" "Throw it out the window. By the way, how do you do that when you're underground?

Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing.

But disillusion is a healthy thing. It leads to reality.

more than once he saw the four equations expressing Einstein's generalized theory of gravitation: He never connected them with the little girl's chant: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so.

Death is the friend of every man, his comrade throughout life, reminding him to waste no moment but to live to the full. And if man has any comrade at all when life is ended, that comrade is Death.

This has happened to people. There was Ambrose Bierce, who walked out of America and existence, and there are thousands of others who have disappeared without a trace, though many of these may not have been caught up by time tornadoes and I do not know if a time gale blew across the deck of the Marie Celeste.

As for civilization, it stinks.

The strange thing was that these thoughts were not altogether unpleasant. They had a wild, black, poisonous beauty of their own, a lovely, deadly shimmer. They possessed the fascination of the impossible, the incredible. They hinted at unimaginable vistas. Even while they terrorized, they did not lose that chillingly poignant beauty. They were like the visions conjured up by some forbidden drug. They had the lure of an unknown sin and an ultimate blasphemy.

I sometimes think that what civilized serenity the British people possess, and small but real ability to smile at themselves, is chiefly due to their good luck in having had William Shakespeare born one of their company.

Sooner give a cobra a kiss, than a secret to a woman.