Quotes from Clifford D. Simak

An android voice answered, "It's Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon." "Thank you, Alice," Adams said.

The name is Asher Sutton.

Sutton is a good man.

Thousands of listeners listening in on the random thoughts of random time and space listening in for clues, for hints, for leads.

If Man had taken a different path, might, he not, in time to come, have been as great as Dog?

The man was a somewhat seedy character. He might not actually have slept in his clothes, although the first impression was that he had. He clutched a threadbare cap with stubby, grimed fingers. The fingernails were rimmed with the blue of dirt.

We'd like to talk to you, sir, if you don't mind," said the woman of the trio. "You see, we're a sort of delegation.

He tilted back his head and stared up at the sky and marveled once again, as he had marveled many other times on many other planets, at the sheer, devastating loneliness and alienness of unfamiliar stars.

She folded fat hands over a plump stomach and did her best to beam at him. The effect of the beam was spoiled by the wispy hair that straggled out from beneath her dowdy hat.

After a while, after a long while. When Man stops believing that racial loyalty means the right to subjugate all other life. It will come, Ash, and humanity will be greater for it, allied to everything that lives, not an arrogant and fearful master.

We want you to sign a petition," said Mrs. Jellicoe.

There's a planet out there somewhere. Fairly close, I'd guess. A freewheeling planet, not tied to any sun, although I gather that it could insert itself into a solar system any time it wishes." "That would take some doing. It would mess up the orbits of all the other planets." "Not necessarily," said Maxwell. "It wouldn't have to take an orbit in the same plane as the other planets. That would hold down the effect of its being there.

The once all-important thing had been buried by more than fifty years of other all-important matters.

He is hated, because he teaches hate. We obey him because we must. He holds our minds in the hollow of his hand.

Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.

to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.

The assurance would be there, he thought, the assurance that life had a special place in the great scheme of existence, that one, no matter how small, how feeble, how insignificant, still did count for something in the vast sweep of space and time.

A man, he told himself, must belong to something, must have some loyalty and some identity.

Pues esto no es nada risible. Se trata sólo de un arco y una flecha, pero no es risible. Pudo haberlo sido en otro tiempo, pero la historia destruyó la comicidad de muchas cosas. Si el arco es un chiste, también lo es entonces la bomba atómica y lo mismo el polvo pestífero que barrió ciudades enteras, y lo mismo el cohete sibilante que se eleva y cae a quince mil kilómetros de distancia matando a un millón de personas.

It must be wonderful, I thought, to be, not exactly rich, but to have enough so you didn't have to worry when there was some little thing you wanted, not to have to wonder if it would be all right if you spent the money for it. To be able to live in a house like this, to line the walls with books and have rich draperies and to have more than just one bottle of booze and a place to keep it other than a kitchen shelf.

A propagandist doesn't have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks convincingly

And the wrench clinched everything.

So I proposed to give the people scientific government…a business administration. An administration that would have run the government exactly as a successful businessman runs his business. The people would have resented it if I had told them they didn't know how to run their affairs. There was only one way to do it…gain control and force it down their throats.

If some of the nations would only take a lesson from some small neighborhood like ours—a lesson in how to get along—the world would be a whole lot better.