Jack Finney - Time and Again (1970)

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It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.

Jack Finney
Sounds impressive. And expensive.
Not at all. Danziger shook his head firmly. It will cost, all told, only a little over three million dollars, less than the cost of two hours of war, and a better buy.

Jack Finney
So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.

Jack Finney
It's going too far! My God, look what has already happened. The scientists make fantastic new discoveries which are immediately taken over by a group, almost a breed of men, who always know what's best for the rest of us. Science learns how to split the atom, and they immediately know that the best thing to do with that new knowledge is to blow up Hiroshima!

Jack Finney
As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there.

Jack Finney
Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?

Jack Finney
Si, a lot of men make far greater sacrifices than he will. For the good of the country.
But he wouldn't even be consulted about it!
Neither are they; they're drafted into the army.
Well, maybe they should be asked, too.
He genuinely didn't understand. What do you mean?
Maybe it's wrong to force a man to join an army and kill other people against his own wishes.
They just looked at me. What I was saying was really incomprehensible to them.

Jack Finney
I like women, I never run them down as somehow inferior to men, and I have a contempt for men who do. And I think, for one thing, that women are just as principled as men—but they sure as hell aren't the same kind of principles.

Jack Finney
I was stunned. I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decision of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician's who made a decision of profound consequence.

Jack Finney