Quotes from George R. Stewart

Men go and come, but earth abides.

The trouble you're expecting never happens; it's always something that sneaks up the other way.

Then, though his sight was now very dim, he looked again at the young men. They will commit me to the earth, he thought. Yet I also commit them to the earth. There is nothing else by which men live. Men go and come, but earth abides.

As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.

If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back.

The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later.

Man has been growing more stupid for several thousand years; I myself shall waste no tears at his demise.

It is a strange thing, he thought, to be an old god. They worship you, and yet they mistreat you. If you do not want to do what they wish, they make you. It is not fair.

For he realized that a man should make peace with himself, even though all conditions changed, and that a man should face the question of whether in his life he had satisfied the ideas which he had built up within himself as to what he should be, and that all this was not a matter of priests and religion but of a man himself.

He started to engage the gears, and then suddenly paused with a feeling of uneasiness. He did not regret leaving his own car, but still something worried him. In a moment he remembered. He went back to his old car, and took out the hammer. He carries it over to the station wagon and laid it at his feet. Then he drove out of the garage.

Men go and come, but the earth abides

During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.

In that world, those with seeing eyes could only blunder about, but the blind man would be at home, and now instead of being the one who was guided by others, he might be one the one to whom the others clung for guidance.

Men have been growing more stupid for several thousand years; I myself shall waste no tears at his demise'- old British man in Earth Abides

a notable bacteriologist indicated that the emergence of some new disease had always been a possibility which had worried the more far-thinking epidemiologists.

As once, when the armies of the empire were shattered and the strong barbarians poured in upon the soft provincials, so now the fierce weeds pressed in to destroy the pampered nursling's of man.

History was an artist, maintaining the idea but changing the details, like a composer keeping the same theme but dulling it to a minor or lifting by an octave, now crooning it with violins, now blaring it on trumpets.

Between the plan and the fulfillment stands always the frail barrier of a human life.

It had been a great thing, in those Old Times, to be an American. You had been deeply conscious of being one of a great nation. It was no mere matter of pride, but also there went with it a profound sense of confidence and security in life, and a comradeship of millions.

Child of the Blessing, who sees not what is, but sees what is not, and seeing thus what is not, imagines also what may be.

There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: "The noise-producing animal." Now there was only the nearly imperceptible murmur of his own engine. He had no need to blow the horn. There were no back-firing trucks, no snorting trains, no pounding planes overhead. In the little towns no whistles blew or bells rang or radios blared or people talked. Even if it was the peace of death, still that was a kind of peace.

It's better," he thought in words, remembering some bit of reading, "to have no opinion of God at all than to have one that is unworthy of Him.

It has never happened!" cannot be construed to mean, "It can never happen!"—as well say, "Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable," or "Because I've never died, I am immortal.

Crusoe's religious preoccupations seemed boring and rather silly.