Robert Silverberg Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I'll keep that in mind. I'll be of good cheer.

Robert Silverberg
There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.

Robert Silverberg
It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus.

Robert Silverberg
Stand near me and you get sick. Why? It reminds you that you're an animal too, because you get a full dose of me. So we go round and round in our endless feedback. You hate me because you learn things about your own soul by getting near me. And I hate you because you must draw back from me. What I am, you see, is a plague carrier, and the plague I carry is the truth. My message is that it's a lucky thing for humanity that we're shut up each in his own skull. Because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurry nonverbal thing I've got, we'd be unable to stand each other. Human society would be impossible.

Robert Silverberg
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 denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.

Robert Silverberg
Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power.

Robert Silverberg
No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.

Robert Silverberg
When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don't boast about it afterward to the victim!

Robert Silverberg
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
It's not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It's an accommodation to the nature of reality.

Robert Silverberg
We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

Robert Silverberg
This isn't just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.
So?
What do I need it for?
Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.

Robert Silverberg
Moas aren't very bright, Gracchus answers. That's one good reason why they became extinct.

Robert Silverberg
Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.

Robert Silverberg
Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.

Robert Silverberg
The cages are ready in case any of the enemies are captured.
You mean us?
Yes. Enemies. Muller's eyes glittered with sudden paranoid fury; it was alarming how easily he slipped from rational discourse to that cold blaze. Homo sapiens. The most dangerous, the most ruthless, the most despicable beast in the universe!
You say it as if you believe it.
I do.

Robert Silverberg
It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

Robert Silverberg
He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people.

Robert Silverberg
The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.

Robert Silverberg
I don't know, Mattison thinks. That's cool. I don't know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to hell with it.

Robert Silverberg
Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.

Robert Silverberg
As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational.

Robert Silverberg
Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

Robert Silverberg
Schwartz closed his eyes. My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.

Robert Silverberg