"That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"It is said that water is for cattle and farmers, that milk is for children and blood for men."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"I'm not so sure he's mad, Father. Just a little devious in his sanity."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was 'the last', the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His "I" was the converse of the imperial "We." "
— Walter M. Miller Jr.

"To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"When there was fear, men huddled in small groups and counted their friends on their fingers, and all else was Foe. "
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (Dark Benediction)

"Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (Dark Benediction)

"He could think only of the girl and the child. He was certain she had been ready to change her mind, had needed only the command, I, a priest of God, adjure thee, and the grace to hear it--if only they had not forced him to stop where she could witness "God's priest" summarily overruled by "Caesar's traffic cop." Never to him had Christ's Kingship seemed more distant"
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"Listen, my dear Cors, why don't you forgive God for allowing pain? If He didn't allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"The captain looked defensive. "You regard our customs as primitive?"

"Every society to its own tastes, captain. The wisdom of one society would be folly for another. Who is qualified to judge? Only the universe, which passes the judgment of survival on all peoples.""
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (Dark Benediction)

"There seems to be at least one common denominator to all intelligent life: it was bipedal and bimannual. Four legs was the most practical number for any animal on any planet, and it seems that nature has nothing else to work with. When she decided to give intelligence to a species, she taught him to stand on his hind legs, freeing his forefeet to become tools of his intellect. And she usually taught him by making him use his hands to climb. As a Cophian biologist had said, "Life first tries to climb a tree to get to the stars. When it fails, it comes down and invents the high-C drive." "
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (Dark Benediction)

""Tell me, how would you feel if everyone screamed and ran when they saw you coming, or hunted you down like a criminal? How long would you sanity last?"..."...Tell me something else, if all the world was blind save one man, wouldn't the world be inclined to call that man's sight a hallucination? And the man with eyes might even come to agree with the world.""
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (Dark Benediction)

"Dom Paulo had not expected to convince him. But it was with a heavy heart that the abbot noticed the plodding patience with which the thon heard him through; it was the patience of a man listening to an argument which he had long ago refuted to his own satisfaction."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"Centuries old, but recently widened, the highway was the same road used by pagan armies, pilgrims, peasants, donkey carts, nomads, wild horsemen out of the east, artillery, tanks, and ten-ton trucks. Its traffic gushed or trickled or dripped, according to the age and season. Once before, long ago, there had been six lanes and robot traffic. Then the traffic had stopped, the paving had cracked, and sparse grass grew in the cracks after an occasional rain. Dust had covered it. Desert dwellers had dug up its broken concrete for the building of hovels and barricades. Erosion made it a desert trail, crossing wilderness. But now there were six lanes and robot traffic, as before."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)

"The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn."
— Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz)