Quotes from Clifford D. Simak

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.

When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe.

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.

The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology

Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?

Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists.

It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species.

Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.

My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over.

What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?

We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.

Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth .

What is a bow and arrow? It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war. It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering. It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.

That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star. Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were people.

With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing.

Here, in this waiting room, one could see a cross section of them—the hoppers, the creepers, the crawlers, the wrigglers, and rollers that came from the many planets, from so many stars. Earth was the galactic melting pot, he thought, a place where beings from the thousand stars met and mingled to share their thoughts and cultures.

He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences. With

Delectable," Ulysses said. "Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.

The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.

He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age—of age and the outdated.

University politics," declared Oop, "doesn't care about liberal traditions or any other kind of traditions.