Walter M Miller Jr. - Collected Quotes

"There is some wisdom, and some foolishness in every people’s way." (Walter M Miller Jr., "The Soul-Empty Ones", 1951)

"Space is my harp, and I touch it lightly with fingers of steel. Space sings." (Walter M. Miller, Jr, "The Big Hunger", 1952)

"A lot of human thinking occurred beneath the level of consciousness, downin the darker regions of the mind where it was not allowed to become conscious lest it bring shame to the thinker. And perhaps he had reasoned it all out in that mental half-world where thoughts are inner ghosts, haunting the possessed man with vague stirrings of uneasiness, leading him into inexplicable behavior." (Walter M Miller Jr, "Way of a Rebel", 1954)

"The machinery of civilization was a living body, with organismic Man as its brain." (Walter M Miller Jr., "Way of a Rebel", 1954)

"The 'romance' of space - drivel written in the old days. When you’re not blasting, you float in a cramped hotbox, crawl through dirty mazes of greasy pipe and cable to tighten a lug, scratch your arms and bark your shins, get sick and choked up because no gravity helps your gullet get the food down." (Walter M Miller Jr., "Death of a Spaceman", 1954)

"A man could change his politics, his friends, his religion, his country, but Men’s tools were a part of his body. Having used a high-powered rifle, the man subsumed the weapon, made it a part of himself. Trading it for a stone axe would be like cutting off his arm. Man was a user of tools, a shaper of environments." (Walter M Miller Jr, "Way of a Rebel", 1954)

"Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteorite dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away." (Walter M Miller Jr, "The Lineman", 1957)

"Apparently the expectation of humor was enough to produce the illusion of humor, and the comedian could elicit laughter with gesture and expression, regardless of what he said." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"During the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible - that ideas were deathless and truth immortal." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise and it would not obey." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"It was a species which often considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speech-makers." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think - as long as they don’t seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"The laws of society are what makes something a crime or not a crime." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)