Algis Budrys Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Armies! he burst out. The day Freemen organize to invade another area is the day they stop being Freemen. They become soldiers, loyal to the army and their generals. They lose their identification with their homes and families. They become a separate class—an armed, organized class of military specialists no one family can stand against. And on that day, freedom dies for everybody.

Algis Budrys
Does it not seem to you, Justice Joyce, that this series of statistics might well occur without the intervention of any Divine Will whatsoever?

Algis Budrys
Once he'd been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he had looked forward to.

Algis Budrys
You look like any other brainless jackanapes, he mused, but apparently there's some gray matter left in your artfully coiffed skull after all.

Algis Budrys
Williamson threw his hands carefully up to heaven and snorted again. Apparently, everything Fay said served to confirm some judgment of mankind on his part.

Algis Budrys
It hadn't had to take the form of this terrible bubble. It might as easily have been a sudden sharp burst behind his eyes or a slower, subtler gnawing at his vitals. But he'd known it was coming, as every man knows and tries to forget it is coming.

Algis Budrys
Sentiment was the easy thing. But logic reminded a man that some people insisted on living their neighbor's lives, that some people were offensive.
There were people with moral codes they clung to and lived by, people who worshiped in what they held to be the only orthodox way, people who clung to some idea—some rock on which their lives rested. Well and good. But if they tried to inflict these reforms on their neighbors, patience could only go so far, and the tolerance of fanaticism lasts just so long.

Algis Budrys
There are various uses for time, and I have better ones than this.

Algis Budrys
It isn't given to very many men to have their dreams come true in their lifetimes.

Algis Budrys
There has to be an end somewhere, he thought. Each thing has to end, or there will never be any room for beginnings.

Algis Budrys
Can I drive you down to your house?
The man flicked an expressive glance along the car's length and shook his head. Thanks. I'll walk. There's still a law of averages.
And you can take that phrase and carve it on Humanity's headstone, Fay thought bitterly, but did not reply.

Algis Budrys
Wasn't being a dilettante the result of an inner conviction that you were too good for routine living?

Algis Budrys
Young man, you're living proof that our basic policy is right. I wouldn't trust an ignoramus like you with the information required to cut his throat.

Algis Budrys
Constantly working outward, putting system after system inside the known universe, they were the bright hungry wave of mankind reaching out to gather in the stars.

Algis Budrys