Quotes from Clifford D. Simak

Money here on Earth is more than the paper or the metal that you use for money, more than the rows of figures that account for money. Here on Earth you have given money a symbolism such as no medium of exchange has anywhere else I have ever known or heard of. You have made it a power and a virtue and you have made the lack of it despicable and somehow even criminal. You measure men by money and you calibrate success with money and you almost worship money.

All things are hard, it said. There is nothing easy.

aimed not at military concentrations, but at total populations. He

Clifford D. Simak did not dedicate his books very often, but he dedicated this one—to his dog. He loved dogs, and he made them prominent features of a number of his stories—and in this case he made it clear that the dog in question, Scootie, was the model for Nathaniel, who can be found in "Census," the third episode in this book, and who became legend to succeeding generations of dogs.

I trade with you my mind.

Supongamos que ha viajado usted en el tiempo, hacia el pasado. ¿Para qué? —Para decirle a usted que Sutton regresará. [...] Cuando Sutton regrese —dijo el forastero—, tienen que matarle.

The wardens," he said, "are acting out an old tradition that may not have any meaning now or may never have had a meaning, something that they clung to through the centuries because it was the one reality they had, the one thing in which they could believe. It gave them a sense of continuity, a belonging to the ancient past. It was something that set them apart as special people and made them important." "And

the ship was coming back—a tiny gnat of steel pushing itself along with twinkling blasts of flaming rocket-fuel.

universe in which time and space had been ruled out because time and space were only put there, in the first place, to make it impossible for anyone to grasp the universe.

although myth may be romanticized and woefully short of fact, it must, by definition, have some foundation in lost happenings.

That it is ancient and, as some writers claim, that it may be of non-Doggish origin in part, is borne out by the abundance of jabberwocky which studs the tales—words and phrases (and worst of all, ideas) which have no meaning now and may have never had a meaning.

the hunter-lust that prodded men to kill something strange or harder to kill or bigger than any man had ever killed before.

The pyramid was built of bottles, hundreds of bottles that flashed and glinted as if with living fire, picking up and breaking up the misty light that filtered from the distant sun and still more distant stars.

Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope … the dream that is doomed long before it's broken, that's the worst of all.

The first question, of course, is whether there ever was such a creature as Man. At the moment, in the absence of positive evidence, the sober consensus must be that there was not, that Man, as presented in the legend, is a figment of folklore invention. Man may have risen in the early days of Doggish culture as an imaginary being, a sort of racial god, on which the Dogs might call for help, to which they might retire for comfort.

Two days, he thought—had it been only two days since he had returned to Earth to find Inspector Drayton waiting? So much had happened that it seemed much longer than just two days ago. So many things had happened that were unbelievable, and still were happening and still unbelievable, but on the outcome of these happenings, he knew, might depend the future of all mankind and the federation that man had built among the other stars. He

succinct description

I sometimes think, said Jason, that the soul may be a state of mind.

He had given them everything that a human being had with the one exception of that most important thing of all -- the ability to exist within the human world.

Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart.

Alone and in the silence, I sensed the purpleness - the formless, subtle personality of the things that owned this planet. There was a friendliness, I thought, but a repulsive friendliness, the fawning friendliness of some monstrous beast. And I was afraid.

Sensing the strange, nagging frustration of a worker who knows his work is nonproductive.

And I think he actually believes the best way to do it is to gain a dictatorship over the Solar System. That ambition rules everything in his life. It has hardened him and strengthened him. He will crush ruthlessly, without a single qualm, anything that stands in his path. That's why we'll have a fight on our hands.

But history was something that you couldn't trust. It was put together wrong, or copied wrong, or misinterpreted, or improved upon by a man with a misplaced imagination. Truth was so hard to keep, myth and fable so easy to breathe into a life that was more acceptable than truth.