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Valentine Michael Smith was as real as taxes but he was a race of one.
the Envoy,
Captain Michael Brant, commanding—pilot, astrogator, relief cook, relief photographer, rocketry engineer; Dr. Winifred Coburn Brant, forty-one, semantician, practical nurse, stores officer, historian; Mr. Francis X. Seeney, twenty-eight, executive officer, second pilot, astrogator, astrophysicist, photographer; Dr. Olga Kovalic Seeney, twenty-nine, cook, biochemist, hydroponicist; Dr. Ward Smith, forty-five, physician and surgeon, biologist; Dr. Mary Jane Lyle Smith, twenty-six, atomics engineer, electronics and power technician; Mr. Sergei Rimsky, thirty-five, electronics engineer, chemical
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manned expedition on a major scale and without delay surely would have been mounted had not World War III intervened.
Simple English he had freshly learned to speak, but much less easily than a Hindu uses it to trade with a Turk.
grok
spinster.”
“No, you’re real bright, for a female.” “Would you like this martini poured in your thinning hair?” “I apologize. Women are lots smarter than men; that is proved by our whole cultural setup.
a government is a living organism. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive. You hit it, it will fight back.
I’ve been awake nights when I should have been dreaming about you, trying to answer that one. It’s a two-part question, political and financial—and
The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge . . . and stronger.
“What is Hecuba to you, or you to Hecuba?”
There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk “his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor” on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else.
“Let our eggs share the same nest.”
“Hi, sister. What you got in the kiester?” “A body,” she snapped. He shrugged. “Ask a jerky question, get a jerky answer. I should learn.”
“My own recipe, a comet cocktail. One third vodka, one third muriatic acid, one third battery water—two pinches of salt and add a pickled beetle.”
him. Do you think you are in love with him?” Jill was startled. She glanced at Dorcas; the other girl appeared not to be hearing the conversation. “Why, that’s preposterous!” “I don’t see anything preposterous about it. You’re a girl; he’s a boy—that’s usually a nice setup.”
my dear, I’m always suspicious of a disinterested interest. You look as if you had a normal glandular balance, so it is my guess that it is either Ben, or this poor boy from Mars, or both. You had better take your motives out in private and have a look at them. Then you will be better able to judge which way you are going.
The results had taught them more about the potentialities of the human race than that race had yet learned about itself, for Smith had grokked very readily things that no other human being had ever learned.
“Oh. Of course. And Ben caught them out!” Jubal looked pained. “Little girl, count to ten thousand by twos while I finish this.
Loooooooool
“Customs, morals—is there a difference? Woman, do you realize what you are doing? Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe—and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don’t you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes—make him feel shame if he doesn’t have it.”
‘Gratitude’ is a euphemism for resentment. Resentment from most people I do not mind—but from pretty little girls it is distasteful to me.”
“I think you were telling the truth, Jill. But a dream is a true experience of a sort and so is a hypnotic delusion.
Pharisees.”
I’ve never been able to understand ‘faith’ myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones—by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether a universe or a smaller one.
volent
I proudly burned toast.” “I’ll bet you did. You’ll make some woman a fine husband yet, if you aren’t careful.” “Oh, I burned it most carefully.”
“The golden sunshine of Italy congealed into tears. Here’s to alcoholic brotherhood . . . much more suited to the frail human soul, if any, than any other sort.”
Democracy’s worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents—a depressingly low level, but what else can you expect?
Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don’t argue with it—especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.
And if ye mingle your affairs with theirs, then they are your brothers.’”
Girls, put it down where we can reach it and maintain a respectful silence.
English is the largest of the human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language—this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and the most flexible—despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits . . . probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing
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Even Dr. Mahmoud, rarely truly off guard with those who did not share with him the one true faith in submission to the Will of God, always beneficent, merciful, found himself relaxed and happy. It had pleased him very much to learn that Jubal read the words of the Prophet . . . and, now that he stopped to notice it, the women of Jubal’s household were really much plumper than he had thought at first glance. That dark one— But he put the thought out of his mind; he was a guest.
negligee
My folks tried to make a preacher out of me and missed by a narrow margin; I guess it still shows.” “It does.” “Don’t rub it in, girl. I would have made a good one if I hadn’t fallen into the fatal folly of reading anything I could lay hands on. With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist.
A confidence man knows that he’s lying; that limits his scope. But a successful shaman ropes himself first; he believes what he says—and such belief is contagious; there is no limit to his scope.
if I ever turned down a free feed, they’d toss me out of the Authors’ Guild.”
of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of ‘altruism’ is the worst. People do what they want to do, every time. If it sometimes pains them to make a choice—if the choice turns out to look like a ‘noble sacrifice—’ you can be sure that it is in no wise nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness . . . the unpleasant necessity of having to decide between two things both of which you would like to do when you can’t do both.
Minds me of a married woman who was very proud of her virtue. She slept with other men only when her husband was away.”
she enjoyed being visually admired because that was the one thing Mike did not give her.
Of course it wasn’t funny; it was tragic. That’s why I had to laugh. I looked at a cageful of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I’ve seen and heard and read about in the time I’ve been with my own people—and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing.”
when apes learn to laugh, they’ll be people.”
it’s better to be tempted and resist, than not to resist and be disappointed.
I have been too long wedded to my own brand of evil and hopelessness to be cleansed in their water of life and become innocent again.
Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective . . . and the saddest perspective of all is to see far, far behind you, the temptations you’ve passed up.
Self-aware man is so built that he cannot believe in his own extinction . . . and this automatically leads to endless invention of religions.
“The depths of winter longing are ice in my heart The shards of broken covenants lie sharp against my soul The wraiths of long-lost ecstasy still keep us two apart The sullen winds of bitterness still keen from turn to pole.
I do not fear the darkness that comes to me apace I only dread the loss of you that comes when I am dead.
the slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time—and then shut up.
