Quotes from George R. Stewart

Well," he explained to Em, "you start then with, say, a million rats, half of them being does or bitches or whatever you call lady rats.

Only now and then had the scholar also become the ruler—Marcus Aurelius, Thomas More, Woodrow Wilson.

Genius is the capacity for seeing what is not there.

A tribe is like a child," he said once, in that thin piping old-man's voice, which every day seemed more like a bird's—and then he coughed. When he recovered, he spoke again. "Yes, a tribe is like a child. You can show it the way by which it should grow up, and perhaps you can direct it a little, but in the end the child will go his own way, and so will the tribe.

old men have a name for them, but I do not remember exactly. It is something like corns." The young man paused, as if to be told the right word, but when he had no reply, he went on again, being obviously eager to show off his knowledge about arrowheads. "We find these little round things in the old buildings. Often there are many—many—of them in the boxes and drawers.

No, the Great Disaster had shown no predilection toward sparing the nice people, and the survivors had not been rendered pleasanter as the result of the ordeal through which they had passed.

Then they died. But they died as men who have finished their work and lie down quietly, secure in their honor.

One of them went to get the thing for which he had cried out. When they brought it, Ish was delighted, and now they laughed at him as if he really were a child, good-naturedly. Ish did not mind. He had what he wanted. It was a scarlet flower—a geranium, which had adapted itself to the new life and lived through these years. It was not the flower but the color, Ish realized, that had given him that sudden pang and made him cry out.

After he had paused just a moment at the red lights, he drove on through them, even though feeling a slight sense of wrongdoing as he did so.