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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3ae4729 | although myth may be romanticized and woefully short of fact, it must, by definition, have some foundation in lost happenings. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 64ad17d | A lark sailed out of a grassy plot and soared high into the sky, and seeing it, he waited for the trill of liquid song to spray out of its throat and drip out of the blue. But there was no song, as there would have been in spring. He | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 9e0cb4b | Our computers have no purpose. They are not alive." "But if they were alive?" "Well, in that case, I suppose the ultimate purpose would be the storage of a universal data and its correlation." "That perhaps is right," they said. "We are living computers." "Then there is no end for you. You'll keep on forever." "We are not sure," they said. "But ..." "Data," they told me, pontifically, "is the means to one end only--arrival at the truth. Per.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 86a0ebe | 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. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 1ea1ede | They're not our responsibility," gritted the mayor. "Whatever happens to them is their own hard luck. We didn't ask them here. We don't want them here. They contribute nothing to the community. You're going to tell me they're misfits. Well, can I help that? You're going to say they can't find jobs. And I'll tell you they could find jobs if they tried to find them. There's work to be done, there's always work to be done. They've been filled .. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 381b278 | You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| dacec09 | It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death of misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle. Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle a.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| ed280a2 | Good man, Thorne, thought Adams. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 3b94b47 | The name is Asher Sutton. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 3c42b83 | Sutton is a good man. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 8310a12 | 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. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 5d9899e | And with the quietness came an abiding sense of peace that seemed to seep into the very fiber of one's being. It was no synthetic thing--not as if someone had invoked a peace and peace then was allowed to exist by sufferance. It was a present and an actual peace, the peace of mind that came with the calmness of a sunset after a long, hot day, or the sparkling, ghost-like shimmer of a springtime dawn. You felt it inside of you and all about .. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| b5f19c4 | He is hated, because he teaches hate. We obey him because we must. He holds our minds in the hollow of his hand. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| cc78c54 | 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. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| c979bff | 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 almos.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 3fc6db3 | 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. But if they had the chance, Enoch told himself, if they ever got a break, if they only coul.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 1a33565 | of Wisconsin | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 6f1feb1 | The whole procedure of his thinking, Jason knew, was an imbecilic exercise; there was no compelling reason for him to seek an answer. And yet his mind bored on and on and he could not stop it, hanging with desperation to an impossibility to which it never should have paid attention. | mind worry thinking | Clifford D. Simak | |
| ad3ea78 | The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with ever nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all the reasons there - a 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. Seen for a moment, half-sensed, a flash of insight that.. | life insight | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 45ce306 | Nothing definite, of course. But say a hundred years to get themselves established as a viable society, perhaps three hundred to rebuild an approximation of the kind of technological setup they had here on Earth. And from there they built on the basis of what they had, with the advantage of being able to drop a lot of ancient millstones they carried around their necks. They build from scratch and to start with there was no need to struggle .. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 9769073 | In the novel All Flesh Is Grass, one of Cliff's characters, Nancy, who was a writer herself, would say of that profession: "It's a thing you don't talk about--not until you're well along with it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start." | writers-on-writing | David W. Wixon | |
| 0d7851c | Man was spread thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim blobs of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness spread across the light-years. For Man had flown too fast, had driven far beyond his physical capacity. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 94e7be3 | But five men had died, three humans and two androids, beside a river that flowed on Aldebaran XII, just a few short miles from Andrelon, the | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| d00a34d | An android voice answered, "It's Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon." "Thank you, Alice," Adams said." -- | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| d3dfcc2 | Thousands of listeners listening in on the random thoughts of random time and space listening in for clues, for hints, for leads. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 706066b | If Man had taken a different path, might, he not, in time to come, have been as great as Dog? | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| d9f0135 | 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. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 1b07e68 | 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." | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 6cf1d88 | 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. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 766302d | We want you to sign a petition," said Mrs. Jellicoe." | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| da88990 | It seems to be a social axiom that as misery and privation increase for the many, the few rise ever higher in luxury and comfort, feeding on the misery. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| f965081 | She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was, in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he'd ever held it. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 909e23f | Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in another station and the materializer had built up a pattern of it -- not only of its body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life. Then the impulse pattern had moved across the gulfs of space almost instantaneously to the receiver of this station, where the pattern had been used to duplicate the body and the mind and the memory and the life of the creature .. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 7b6be6b | When I was a teenager I had posters of all of my favorite musicians up on my bedroom walls--David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Edgar Winter's They Only Come Out at Night, and the first KISS album. My dad didn't really know what to make of it. One time he came into my room while I was listening to music and looked at all the posters and said, "You're a fag, aren't you?" This was an actual one-sided conversation we had." | Keith Morris | ||
| b9318db | England had been conquered by the Vikings, and its ancient royal family were in exile - in Normandy. | Marc Morris | ||
| 8b9a971 | In the final analysis, therefore, the tomb of Edward I may stand, like the unfinished castle at Caernarfon, not only as a monument to the past, but also as a warning to the future: a final reminder of the power of myth to shape men's minds and motives, and thus to alter the fate of nations. | Marc Morris | ||
| 4dfcbac | Indeed, according to William of Malmesbury, one of them staged something of a counter-demonstration by dropping his trousers and farting loudly in the king's general direction. | Marc Morris | ||
| ec189f7 | In his effort to appease his Christian taxpayers in parliament, Edward stripped away the traditional protections that earlier kings of England had extended towards the country's Jewish community. During his rule the Jews were forbidden to lend money at interest, stigmatised as infidels and ultimately expelled. Modern commentators have naturally judged Edward harshly for this, though they often err in presenting him as a pioneer. He was, it .. | Marc Morris | ||
| 84e6386 | According to Harris, Dawkins and other prominent neoatheists (Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett round out the self-styled "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"), science education is a natural antidote to sacred terror. But independent studies by Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, and journalist and political scientist Peter Bergen indicate that a majority of al-Qaeda members and associates went to coll.. | Benny Morris | ||
| 1cc5e2c | whole universe can be thought of as a delayed-choice experiment in which the existence of observers who notice what is going on is what imparts tangible reality to the origin of everything. Following | John Gribbin | ||
| 150e7c4 | The image that emerges from quantum physics is similar in some ways to the way that the illusion that air, or water is a continuous fluid emerges. Myriad tiny particles separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth fluid. Myriad quantum states separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth flow of time. Zeno was right. The arrow of time points, but it does not move. THE | John Gribbin | ||
| b973be9 | The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics -an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the laws of statistics to the behaviour of large numbers of particles, such as the huge number of atoms or molecules present in a box of gas, each of them acting in accordance with Newton's laws. | John Gribbin | ||
| 9e83dbd | The natural effect of processes going on in the Universe is to move from a state of order to a state of disorder, unless there is an input of energy from outside | John Gribbin | ||
| 2145a0e | Curiously, though, we only have to look at one of the two slits for the outcome of the whole experiment to be affected, as if the electrons passing through the other slit also knew what we were doing. This is an example of quantum "non-locality," which means that what happens in one location seems to affect events in another location instantly. Non-locality is a key feature of the central mystery of quantum mechanics, and a vital ingredient.. | John Gribbin |