Harry Harrison > Quotes

“Every day should be unwrapped as a gift.”
― Harry Harrison

“We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment...”
― Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat

“One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and burned it and it's gone now.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“But doing something means that people must change, make an effort, use their minds, which is what most people do not like to do.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“Intelligence resembles insanity only to the stupid.”
― Harry Harrison, The Technicolor Time Machine

“So mankind gobbled in a century all the world’s resources that had taken millions of years to store up, and no one on the top gave a damn or listened to all the voices that were trying to warn them, they just let us overproduce and overconsume until now the oil is gone, the topsoil depleted and washed away, the trees chopped down, the animals extinct, the earth poisoned, and all we have to show for this is seven billion people fighting over the scraps that are left, living a miserable existence—and still breeding without control. So I say the time has come to stand up and be counted.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“I have been followed by enough police robots to know by now how indestructible they are. You can blow them up or knock them down and they keep coming after you; dragging themselves by one good finger and spouting saccharine morality all the while.”
― Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat

“You can't stop the world and get off, so you just have to learn to live on it.”
― Harry Harrison

“Let me tell you, I may look old but that’s just because of my age.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“Birth control doesn’t mean no children. It just means that people have a choice how they want to live. Like rutting, unthinking, breeding animals—or like reasoning creatures. Will a married couple have one, two or three children—whatever number will keep the world population steady and provide a full life of opportunity for everyone? Or will they have four, five or six, unthinking and uncaring, and raise them in hunger and cold and misery? Like that world out there,”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“Liberation by destruction was on the way! We would free them even if we had to kill them all to do it!”
― Harry Harrison, A Stainless Steel Trio: A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues

“We got a plague of people, a disease of people infesting the world. We got more people who are living longer. Less people have to be born, that’s the answer. We got death control—we got to match it with birth control.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“I always get the best advice from myself.”
― Harry Harrison, A Stainless Steel Trio: A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues

“The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“Darling, the history of medicine is the history of the violation of natural law. The Church—and that includes the Protestant as well as the Catholic—tried to stop the use of anesthetics because it was natural law for a woman to have pain while giving birth. And it was natural law for people to die of sickness. And natural law that the body not be cut open and repaired.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“The Welfare ration cards took care of everything, everything that kept you alive and just alive enough to hate it.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“It is amazing the things people will believe if you catch them early enough.”
― Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge

“He didn't say so but Andy agreed with the bodyguard. A good-looking bird like this one didn't have to kill anyone. What she did she did for D's and if a guy gave her too much trouble she'd just walk out and find someone else with money. Not murder.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“It is a nasty world that only respects bullies.”
― Harry Harrison, A Stainless Steel Trio: A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues

“Two, four, six, eight—Welfare rations come too late. Three, five, seven, nine—Medicare is still behind.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“Because of the power shortage and lack of replacement parts there was only one elevator running in the Empire State Building, and this one went only as high as the twenty-fifth floor. After that you walked.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“There isn’t a person alive who has not been afraid at one time or another. It is only the brave man who can feel fear and still go forward.”
― Harry Harrison, A Stainless Steel Trio: A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues

“Gratitude you can’t expect, a salary you can. It’s a job.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“NEW YORK CITY— —stolen from the trusting Indians by the wily Dutch, taken from the law-abiding Dutch by the warlike British, then wrested in turn from the peaceful British by the revolutionary colonials.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“It is very hard to be a hypocrite if you aren't trained for it.”
― Harry Harrison, Deathworld

“In all cultures mothers try to shape sons in their female image. For their own good. The boys resist—and the rite of passage helps this resistance. There is always symbolism involved, because symbols are a way to represent the myths that underlie every culture.”
― Harry Harrison, A Stainless Steel Trio: A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues

“DIS ... DIS ... DIS ... it was a word it was a planet and the word thundered like a drum a drum the sound of its thunder surrounded and was a wasteland a planet of death a planet where living was dying and dying was very better than living DIS”
― Harry Harrison, Planet of the Damned

“How can you kill something that never existed? We’re all winners in the ovarian derby, yet I never heard anyone crying about the—if you will excuse the biological term—the sperm who were the losers in the race.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“At times there can be a very thin line between right and wrong. If you are emotionally involved the line is almost impossible to see.”
― Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat