Robert Silverberg Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.

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

Robert Silverberg
He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for... although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.

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

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
Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract developments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet.

Robert Silverberg
I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?

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
Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.

Robert Silverberg
It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty.

Robert Silverberg
Research, he calls it. Research. Pitkin sneered. Junkie!
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. Economist!

Robert Silverberg
Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.

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

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
I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.

Robert Silverberg
May I be struck dead for saying this if I don't mean it with all my heart: I wish the Lord and all his prophets would disappear and leave us alone. We've had enough religion for one season.

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