Quotes from Fritz Leiber

An obscure sect, having as part of its creed the injunction Don't take yourself so damn seriously, won new adherents. The

The brandy was all drunk.

When men are to be led it is rarely wise to discuss policy or tactics with them. Most men work best when they know only what is expected of them. Then they can't get confused and they do not get ideas of how to do things better.

She was vanilla ice cream with meringue and maple syrup on

he was a sporadically ardent chess player now in the midst of a sporad.

Jonner's name had become a legend of the days when there were giants in the Earth, mighty men whose thinking had gone beyond the concept of nations to envision one race, beyond the creeds of churches to see one faith, and beyond the dogma of economics to state that as long as one hungry man existed on the face of the earth, no man with a full dinner in front of him was free to eat his meal in peace and safety.

Always it had been the same; leaders arose holding before men the illusion of vast, glorious promises while they carefully led them into hells of lost dreams and broken promises.

Look, all of us have our private rituals—our own little peculiar ways of eating and drinking and sleeping and going to the bathroom. Rituals we're hardly conscious of, but that would look mighty strange if analyzed. You know, to step or not to step on cracks in the sidewalk. Things like that.

Women are horrible. I mean, quite as horrible as men. Oh, is there anyone in the wide world that has aught but ice water in his or her veins?

The way nails sometimes insist on bending when you hammer, as if they were trying to. Or the way machinery refuses to work. Matter's funny stuff. In large aggregates, it obeys natural law, but when you get down to the individual atom or electron, it's largely a matter of chance or whim—

Suppose you applied this principle outside bridge? Suppose that coincidence and other chance happenings weren't really as chancy as they looked? Suppose there were individuals with a special aptitude for calling the turns, making the breaks? But that was a pretty obvious idea—nothing to give a person the shiver it had given him.

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hyserical laughter...the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever. A Bit of the Dark World

THE ROBOT MEN OF BUBBLE CITY, by Rog Phillips Originally published in Fantastic Adventures, July 1949. Turlogh Hogan pressed the stud that raised the parabolic projector but of its recess in the hull of his ship. The second the light on the panel flashed on, signaling the projector was in operating position, he flicked the relay button that sent the ultra-high frequency current through its opposing coils.

Cos'è il buon senso… oggi, nel Ventesimo secolo, in qualunque epoca? L'aderenza a una norma. Il conformarsi a certe convenzioni di base che regolano l'intera condotta umana. Nella nostra epoca, l'allontanarsi della norma è diventata la norma. L'incapacità di conformarsi è diventato il modello del conformismo.

Modern toys entertain them with a bag of tricks that leave the young 'uns no room for imagination. They couldn't possibly think up, on their own, all the screwy things these new toys do.

The quick, daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life.

It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the countryside as we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as Gertie Stein might put it, you can't time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.

Lord, what romantical fools men were, to overpass the known and good in order to strain and stretch after the mysterious merely unknown. Were dreams simply better than reality? Had fancy always more style?

At Cold Corner in midwinter, the women of the Snow Clan were waging a cold war against the men. They trudged about like ghosts in their whitest furs, almost invisible against the new-fallen snow, always together in female groups, silent or at most hissing like angry shades. They avoided Godshall with its trees for pillars and walls of laced leather and towering pine-needle roof.

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself's the beginning of all love.

He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.

There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.