Quotes from Gordon R. Dickson

I, wanderer, stand awaiting the signal.

They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man. These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more.

there was more to modern mining than logic. The best engineers had feel. It was a sensitivity born of experience, of talent, and even of something like love, with which they commanded, not only the mountains, but the machine they rode and directed. Now this too was added to the list of man's endeavors for which some special talent was needed.

Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst his books. For to you Kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned by the flicking of a finger … LESSONS: Anonymous

the trick with modern warfare was not to outgun the enemy, but carry weapons he could not gimmick.

We wouldn't be capable of hope, if hope had no meaning.

But I'm not an expert," said Cletus. "I'm a scholar. There's a difference. An expert's a man who knows a great deal about his subject. A scholar's someone who knows all there is that's available to be known about it.

For sooner or later, no matter what fantastic long-range weapons you mounted, the ground itself had to be taken —and for that there had never been anything but the man in the ranks.

We're painted savages, nothing more, in spite of what we like to think of as some thousands of years of civilization. Only our present paint's called clothing and our caves called buildings

Sir Brian told him in fulsome scatological terms what he could do with his lineage.

they're blinded by the limited focus of their attitudes toward time and history. They only look as far as their own lifetime. No, they don't even look that far. They only look at how things are for their own generation.

fighting an endless war and getting nowhere, surrounded by those who found simply being in the war enough to justify their existence. He

There was a minority among the human race, as there always had been, that found comfort in trading a personal freedom of mind and body for the relief of clinging to a stronger certainty than they were able to produce within themselves.

Why it was all your doing," replied t

the sun, which had been slipping into the far-off waterline of the horizon, took the last few degrees of its plunge and disappeared with tropical suddenness, leaving them only the fading blue of the sky.