Quotes from Alexei Panshin

Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with.

Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead.

If I had the opportunity, I would make the proposal that no man should be killed except by somebody who knows him well enough for the act to have impact. No death should be like nose blowing. Death is important enough that it should affect the person who causes it.

There is a lesson that I learned at twelve - the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson - that neither does the world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary spear carrier among them.

Night is irregular. What is not done in the daytime becomes possible at night: murder and sex and thought. Simple men are driven to early beds by tomorrow's daytime demands and by fear of the dark, and never dream of the irregular world outside. And all the while, a viscount and a spaceport baggage boy might be passing the night rolling bok ball in the city park. That's more than unusual -- that is irregular.

There is something unique about the size, and shape, and feel of a real physical book, and there is a real discovery about running your eye along a line of books and picking one out because it somehow LOOKS right.

If you read Rite of Passage and enjoy yourself, I couldn't be more pleased. I hope it gets you of. On the other hand, if you should be assigned Rite of Passage , and you start to read it and it doesn't work for you, just put it aside and forget the whole thing. Tell the teacher I said it was okay. Okay?

The trouble is that each of us is his own hero, existing in a world of spear carriers.

Every man in the world is either a Realist or a Nominalist. Give yourself a test: if someone called you a gigger or a fell-picker, and you knew it wasn't true, would you hit him or smile? That's how easy it is to tell.

Everybody should espouse three or four harmless crank theories for the pure pleasure of having something harmless to be cranky about. And when a theory of this sort proves correct, it is a true moment for celebration.

It was, if you like, an oasis in the general desert of childish and adult ignorance where we could safely bring out our thoughts and not have them denigrated, laughed at, or trampled upon, even when they deserved it. A place like that is precious.

I don't like the idea of people who don't sing to themselves when they're all alone. They're too sober for me. At least hum-- anybody can do that.

If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn't, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those "mature" people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures.

The rest of our weekend sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, hand-prepared food was simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who confused rustic vacations with life.

I didn't want to go forward—I didn't like what I saw there. But I couldn't go back, either, because I tried that and it didn't work. And you can't spend your life on a tightrope.

My paper was a direct discussion and comparison of half-a-dozen ethical systems, concentrating on what seemed to me to be their flaws. I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were *right* and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions

In any case, I hadn't gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.

There's no reason to trade insults. We have our way of life and they have theirs. I wouldn't live as they do, but disrespect seems pointless. I'm sure there are good people among them.