On Literature: On Society (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." (Charles Fort, "Lo!", 1931)

"The machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"At least half of mankind [...] still makes an unconscious equation in its thinking, and assumes that change - any sort of change - is identical with progress. It is not so; and any student of the course of evolutionary history on Terra could tell you of change which has been regressive, change which has led to an ultimately fatal specialization, change which has been overadaptation to an ecological niche which no longer existed, or did not yet exist." (Margaret St Clair, "Agent of the Unknown", 1952)

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)

"Progress is a tension between the notion of perfection and the notion that striving, not finding, is important." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Her grandparents, believers in progress, had always told her things were better now. Human minds had been darker when people couldn’t read late at night, their prejudices greater when they had lacked television’s images of other places, their work harder without the appliances many took for granted. Nina was not so sure; technical civilization had isolated people from the basics of life, and had fooled them into believing that they controlled the world." (Pamela Sargent, "The Old Darkness", 1983)

"An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake." (Frank Wilczek,"The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces", 2008)

On Literature: On Curves (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary; most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death."  (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"[...] the time stream is curved helically in some higher dimension. In your case, a still further distortion brought two points of the coil into contact, and a sort of short circuit threw you into the higher curve." (Robert H Wilson, "A Flight Into Time", Wonder Stories, 1931)

"The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping curve of the sandy bay between the headlands, the outline of the hills, the shape of the clouds, all these are so many riddles of form, so many problems of morphology." (Sir D’Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)

"The mathematicians and physics men have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, they invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The Great Wound", 1963)

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)

"Well it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point. a discontinuity in the curve of life - do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what! A-and right across the point, it's minus infinity! How's that for sudden change, eh?" (Thomas Pynehon, "Gravity's Rainbow", 1973)

"The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent." (Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)

"It is now known to science that there are many more dimensions than the classical four. Scientists say that these don’t normally impinge on the world because the extra dimensions are very small and curve in on themselves, and that since reality is fractal most of it is tucked inside itself. This means either that the universe is more full of wonders than we can hope to understand or, more probably, that scientists make things up as they go along." (Terry Pratchett, "Pyramids", 1989)

"History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call ‘world lines' on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going 0 it is a matter of simple extrapolation." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)

On Literature: On Time (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"Some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine: An Invention", 1895)

"Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization." (Rabindranath Tagore, "The Meaning of Art", 1926)

"[...] the time stream is curved helically in some higher dimension. In your case, a still further distortion brought two points of the coil into contact, and a sort of short circuit threw you into the higher curve." (Robert H Wilson, "A Flight Into Time", Wonder Stories, 1931)

"Rest enough for the individual man - too much, and too soon - and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and) ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning." (Stephen V Benét," By the Waters of Babylon", 1937)

"The very basis of human civilization was leisure [...] spare time in which to indulge curiosity and experiment." (Edmond Hamilton, "The Ephemerae", 1938)

"Man has natural three-dimensional limits, and he also has four-dimensional ones, considering time as an extension. When he reaches those limits, he ceases to grow and mature, and forms rigidly within the mold of those limiting walls. It is stasis, which is retrogression unless all else stands still as well. A man who reaches his limits is tending toward subhumanity. Only when he becomes superhuman in time and space can immortality become practical." (Henry Kuttner & Catherine L Moore [aka Lewis Padgett], "Time Enough", 1946)

"Space and Time aren’t real, apart. And they aren’t really different. They fade one into the other all around us." (Jack Williamson, "The Legion of Space", 1947)

"There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more [...] more plus infinity." (Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1953)

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to Man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ... The Twilight Zone." (Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone" [TV series] 1959)

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)

"An infinity of universes swim in superspace, all passing through their own cycles of birth and death; some are novel, others repetitious; some produce macrolife, others do not; still others are lifeless. In time, macrolife will attempt to reach out from its cycles to other space-time bubbles, perhaps even to past cycles, which leave their echoes in superspace, and might be reached. In all these ambitions, only the ultimate pattern of development is unknown, drawing macrolife toward some future transformation still beyond its view. There are times when the oldest macrolife senses that vaster intelligences are peering in at it from some great beyond [...]" (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife", 1979)

"Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea." (Gregory Benford, "Timescape", 1980)

"The dimension of the imagination is much more complex than those of time and space, which are very junior dimensions indeed." (Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic", 1983)

"Nothing in those years matched the impact of the equable, incontrovertible statement that I did not matter, that my life was of no moment to anyone but myself. We accept that only one person in a million has real importance to the race but each of us remains the centre of his universe, the pivot of energy and mind. That man told me in a single sentence that the world would not flicker if I ceased to exist, that it would have affected nothing if I had never existed and that my continued existence would affect nothing in the stream of time." (George Turner, "Drowning Towers", 1987)

"History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call 'world lines' on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going - it is a matter of simple extrapolation." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)

"There is a way of looking far into the distant past and seeing everything that happened there. The same method can be used to observe distant events while they are actually happening - and also, of course, events that took place both long ago and far away. It is even possible to spy upon what is occurring in the alternative universes - those parts of the polycosmos which, unreified in our own time-line, exist for us only as the sites of dreams." (John Grant, "The World", 1992)

"We live forever, we transform ourselves, we transform worlds, solar systems, we ship across interstellar space, we defy time and deny death, but the one thing we cannot recreate is memory [...]" (Ian MacDonald, "The Days of Solomon Gursky", 1998)

On Literature: On Curiosity (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"I wanted to see what no one had yet observed, even if I had to pay for this curiosity with my life." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea", 1870)

"Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will." (James Stephens, "The Crock of Gold", 1912)

"The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us. This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it." (John Wyndham, "The Lost Machine", 1932)

"The very basis of human civilization was leisure [...] spare time in which to indulge curiosity and experiment." (Edmond Hamilton, "The Ephemerae", 1938)

"Earth hung in the after port behind and below him, a soft emerald crescent in its first thin quarter. A warm green sickle that was home, a hustling verdant young world impatient to push its way across black empty space and satisfy its lusty curiosity about its cosmic neighbors." (Roger Dee," Unwelcome Tenant", 1950)

"The mysteries of the universe and the questions that scientists strive to answer never come to an end. For that we should be grateful. A universe in which their were no mysteries for curious men to ponder would be a very dull universe indeed."(Isaac Asimov, "The Search for the Elements", 1962)

"Every intelligent creature was curious - and curiosity prompted it to act when something incomprehensible took place."(Stanislaw Lem, "The Hunt", 1968)

"If space people didn’t have curiosity, they probably wouldn’t be space people." (Stephen Tall, "The Bear with the Knot on His Tail", 1971)

"It surprises me how our culture can destroy curiosity in the most curious of all animals - human beings." (Paul Maclean)

On Literature: On Economics (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"It was in this world that we found in its most striking form a social disease which is perhaps the commonest of all world-diseases - namely, the splitting of the  population into two mutually unintelligible castes through the influence of economic forces." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)

"Science fiction is, very strictly and literally, analogous to science facts. It is a convenient analog system for thinking about new scientific, social, and economic ideas - and for re-examining old ideas." (John W Campbell Jr., "Prologue to Analog", 1962)

"Politics is the enemy of a sound economic entity." (Philip K. Dick, "The Crack in Space", 1965)

"When a country’s economy was in rotten shape, the easiest dodge was to start a war as a pretext for gagging everyone immediately." (Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky, "Prisoners of Power", 1969)

"He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result." (John K Galbraith, "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went", 1975)

"It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result - collapse, ruin and famine." (Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)

"That’s a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)

"History, as every mature Aten knew, was simply the evolution of economics." (Ralph A Sperry, "On Vacation", 1998)

On Literature: On Nature (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Consequently, these laws of nature need only be discovered, and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy. Needless to say, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or, better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the present-day encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world." (Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from Underground", 1864)

"Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"From a caprice of nature, not from the ignorance of man. Not a mistake has been made in the working. But we cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"Nature eludes calculation. Number is a grim pullulation. Nature is the thing that cannot be numbered." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1874)

"When we think how narrow and how devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly  upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strangeby-paths into which the human spirit may wander." (Arthur C Doyle," Lot No. 249’", 1892)

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)

"Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "Nausea", 1938)

"Natural phenomena are less often produced by nature and most often produced by man." (Alfred Bester, "The Devil’s Invention", 1950)

"Is there anything more contemptible than Nature? The scientists, the philosophers have always tried to understand Nature, while the thing to do is to destroy it!" (Stanislaw Lem, "The Sanitorium of Dr. Vliperdius", 1971)

"Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense, the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction." (Kate Wilhelm, 1974) 

"The force of gravity-though it is the first force with which we are acquainted, and though it is always with us, and though it is the one with a strength we most thoroughly appreciate-is by far the weakest known force in nature. It is first and rearmost." (Isaac Asimov, 1976)

"In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data." (Carl Sagan, "The Dragons of Eden", 1977)

"One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them [...] these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension - between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see - is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain - or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create? - are the ones found in the world around us." (John Barnes, "Mother of Storms", 1994)

 "Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they’d first thought to wonder at the heavens." (Peter Watts, "Echopraxia", 2014)

"One of the elementary rules of nature is that, in the absence of a law prohibiting an event or phenomenon, it is bound to occur with some degree of probability. To put it simply and crudely: Anything that can happen does happen." (Kenneth W Ford)

On Literature: On Divinity (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will." (William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", 1601)

"There's such divinity doth hedge a king,

That treason can but peep to what it would." (William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", 1601)

"A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set. Wheels of storm-chariots. The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-stars. A s surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six..." (Henry D Thoreau, "The Journal Of Thoreau" Vol. 2, 1856) 

"In One Dimensions, did not a moving Point produce a Line with two terminal points? In two Dimensions, did not a moving Line produce a Square wit four terminal points? In Three Dimensions, did not a moving Square produce - did not the eyes of mine behold it - that blessed being, a Cube, with eight terminal points? And in Four Dimensions, shall not a moving Cube - alas, for Analogy, and alas for the Progress of Truth if it be not so - shall not, I say the motion of a divine Cube result in a still more divine organization with sixteen terminal points?" (Edwin A Abbott, "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions", 1884)

"Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known." (Clifford D Simak, "City", 1952)

"What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what ‘the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history', - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your only clue. Get the facts!" (Robert A Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love", 1973)

"The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus." (Robert Silverberg, "Homefaring", 1983)

On Literature: On Extrema (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"All evils are equal when they are extreme." (Pierre Corneille, "Horace", 1639)

"It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another." (Jonathan Swift, "A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome,", 1701)

"The extreme limit of wisdom — that's what the public calls madness." (Jean Cocteau, "Le Coq et l'Arlequin", 1918)

"Of course she believed the blessed lie, for in times of extreme peril it is human to be optimistic." (Roman F Starzl, "The Planet of Despair", 1931)

"It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Exploration of Space", 1951)

"The mind can go either direction under stress - toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life - which is fundamentally dependent on light - to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that." (Isaac Asimov, "Nightfall: and other stories", 1969) 

"'It bedevils me sometimes why I am the only one to notice the analogy between historical geology and depth psychology', Terrence Burdock mused as they grew lightly profound around the campfire. 'The isostatic principle applies to the mind and the under-mind as well as it does to the surface and? undersurface of the earth. The mind has its erosions and weatherings going on along with its deposits and accumulations. It also has its upthrusts and its stresses. It floats on a similar magma. In extreme cases it has its volcanic eruptions and its mountain building.'" (Raphael A Lafferty, "Continued on Next Rock", 1970)

"Extremes of any sort are a liability, in terms of evolution. Extreme intellect may be as bad for us as extreme physical size was for the dinosaurs." (Joan Slonczewski, "The Wall around Eden", 1989)

"We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us holds these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion." (Michael Crichton, "Mediasaurus: The decline of conventional media", [Speech at the National Press Club] 1993) 

"Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes." (Frank Schätzing, "The Swarm", 2004)

Robert Silverberg - Collected Quotes

"It was beyond him how someone could voluntarily let himself get involved in this game of dimension-shifting and mutant-battling. But it takes all sorts to make a continuum." (Robert Silverberg, "MUgwump 4" 1959)

"He swung dizzily along the line of time, as he had done so often before. He saw himself, here and here, and saw others, shadow-figures, dream-figures, lurking behind the curtains of time." (Robert Silverberg, "Open the Sky", 1966)

"Forget it. No, don't forget it. Don't forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

"The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

"You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

 "You have come to the place where all times are one, where all errors can be unmade, where past and future are fluid and subject to redefinition." (Robert Silverberg, "Breckenridge and the Continuum", 1973)

"He didn't have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer." (Robert Silverberg, "Born with the Dead", 1974)

"To a dead the whole universe is plastic, nothing’s real, nothing matters a hell of a lot, it’s all only a joke." (Robert Silverberg, "Born with the Dead", 1974)

"In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can't perceive the greater structures, it's because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn't need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we'd be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing." (Robert Silverberg, "The Stochastic Man", 1975)

"We are born by accident into a purely random universe." (Robert Silverberg, "The Stochastic Man", 1975)

"The only workable time machine ever invented is the science-fiction story." (Robert Silverberg, [introduction] "Trips in Time", 1977)

"The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus." (Robert Silverberg, "Homefaring", 1983)

"Time devours everything. Entire histories vanish. What matters is endurance. The spirit survives and goes onward when the palaces crumble and the kings are forgotten." (Robert Silverberg, "Letters from Atlantis", 1990)

Clive S Lewis - Collected Quotes

"This is called the inductive method. Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact." (Clive S Lewis, "The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism", 1933)

"If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant - but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error." (Clive S Lewis, "Bulverism", 1941)

"Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. [...] As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time." (Clive S Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", 1942)

"The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior - this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that 'history is bunk." (C. S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", 1942)

"A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on." (Clive S Lewis, "The Great Divorce", 1945)

"A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating." (Clive S Lewis, "Mere Christianity", 1952)

"It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts […]." (Clive S Lewis, “The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature”, 1964)

"The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time." (Clive S Lewis, "Christian Reflections", 1967)

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” (Clive S Lewis)

"Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them." (Clive S Lewis)