Quotes from Clifford D. Simak

And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.

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.

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?

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

I can't go back," said Towser. "Nor I," said Fowler. "They would turn me back into a dog," said Towser. "And me," said Fowler, "back into a man.

Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.

That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.

Jenkins tried to say goodbye, but he could not say goodbye. If he could only weep, he thought, but robots could not weep.

You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.

These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story's done they ask many questions: "What is Man?" they'll ask. Or perhaps: "What is a city?" Or: "What is a war?

We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. 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.

And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.

Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it. He

A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river – but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself – a thing that went on caring.

For it was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than a person.

Race preservation is a myth … a myth that you all have lived by—a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him—so far as he's concerned there is no longer any race.

It's just a bow and arrow, but it's not a laughing matter. It might have been at one time, but history takes the laugh out of many things. If the arrow is a joke, so is the atom bomb, so is the sweep of disease laden dust that wipes out whole cities, so is the screaming rocket that arcs and falls then thousand miles away and kills a million people.

But man had changed. He had lost the old knowledge and old skills. His mind had become a flaccid thing. He lived from one day to the next without any shining goal. But he still kept the old vices—the vices that had become virtues from his own viewpoint and raised him by his own bootstraps. He kept the unwavering belief that his was the only kind, the only life that mattered—the smug egoism that made him the self-appointed lord of all creation.

Well," said Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, "it don't matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. 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.

It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were smart and quick and at times compassionate and even understanding, but they failed lamentably in many other ways.

He needed sun and soil and wind to remain a man.

Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.