Quotes from Harry Harrison

The horse tires not of hay, the porcuswine will snuffle up his swill greedily unto eternity.

The principles we live by, in business and in social life, are the most important part of happiness.

I like Ireland because it means I'm near France.

Every day should be unwrapped as a gift.

One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and burned it and it's gone now.

We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment...

But doing something means that people must change, make an effort, use their minds, which is what most people do not like to do.

Intelligence resembles insanity only to the stupid.

I have been followed by enough police robots to know by now how indestructible they are. You can blow them up or knock them down and they keep coming after you; dragging themselves by one good finger and spouting saccharine morality all the while.

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead.

Liberation by destruction was on the way! We would free them even if we had to kill them all to do it!

Let me tell you, I may look old but that's just because of my age.

We got a plague of people, a disease of people infesting the world. We got more people who are living longer. Less people have to be born, that's the answer. We got death control—we got to match it with birth control.

Birth control doesn't mean no children. It just means that people have a choice how they want to live. Like rutting, unthinking, breeding animals—or like reasoning creatures. Will a married couple have one, two or three children—whatever number will keep the world population steady and provide a full life of opportunity for everyone? Or will they have four, five or six, unthinking and uncaring, and raise them in hunger and cold and misery? Like that world out there

You can't stop the world and get off, so you just have to learn to live on it.

Two, four, six, eight—Welfare rations come too late. Three, five, seven, nine—Medicare is still behind.

Because of the power shortage and lack of replacement parts there was only one elevator running in the Empire State Building, and this one went only as high as the twenty-fifth floor. After that you walked.

It is a nasty world that only respects bullies.

The Welfare ration cards took care of everything, everything that kept you alive and just alive enough to hate it.

Darling, the history of medicine is the history of the violation of natural law. The Church—and that includes the Protestant as well as the Catholic—tried to stop the use of anesthetics because it was natural law for a woman to have pain while giving birth. And it was natural law for people to die of sickness. And natural law that the body not be cut open and repaired.

I always get the best advice from myself.

He didn't say so but Andy agreed with the bodyguard. A good-looking bird like this one didn't have to kill anyone. What she did she did for D's and if a guy gave her too much trouble she'd just walk out and find someone else with money. Not murder.

In all cultures mothers try to shape sons in their female image. For their own good. The boys resist—and the rite of passage helps this resistance. There is always symbolism involved, because symbols are a way to represent the myths that underlie every culture.

Gratitude you can't expect, a salary you can. It's a job.