Again, Dangerous Visions Quotes

“Story after story has marched the same old WASP engineer paperdoll through the same old story lines, most of which were very good when they were used by H. G. Wells, but which are now showing signs of wear.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“The problem isn’t what to say about the incredible Ursula Le Guin, it’s where to start.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“Think about this, drunk comes in four parts, jocose, morose, bellicose, comatose.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“Too many of our insanities are tolerated because they are harmless on an individual level—but multiply them by a millionfold and you have a nation that is culturally sick. These things stem from each individual’s conception of himself—which he arbitrarily assumes to be the nature of the world as well. These conceptions are haphazardly picked up during youth—along with all of the other opinions, neuroses, hangups and etceteras common to the human animal.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“The English are slightly more civilized than anyone else has yet been. Also England is a good country for introverts; they have a place in society for the introvert, which the United States has not.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“Sometimes it seems to me the modern world can only be viewed as conspiracy. The Right tends to credit communism with planning race riots and campus disorders”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“Also England is a good country for introverts; they have a place in society for the introvert, which the United States has not.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“Miriam apo Magdalla, when I spoke of writing down her account of the Master’s life and sayings, answered mockingly, “If Jesus had wanted a book written he would have written it himself. It was to free us from a book that He took on flesh! What need have we of a book when God speaks through us directly? Did Jesus not say, ‘The letter brings death; the spirit, life’? He who lives by a book is unfaithful to the Holy Spirit within himself, as if God, having spoken once, could never speak again. I say, on the day that men open the book of ink and papyrus, they will close the book of the Spirit, and men will no longer do good, but only devote their lives to catching each other in errors, pointing to the papyrus and saying, ‘See! I am right and you are wrong!’ Is this faith, to say that God’s words may be lost? I say, if all record of God’s words be lost, He need but say them again, and those who have ears to hear will hear. And I say further that those who love a book more than God will become murderers and torturers and liars and tyrants and be able to justify every sort of monstrous cruelty by quoting their book. God is within me, or there is no God! And if He is within me, He will tell me Himself, directly, all that I should know.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“Still, the mythology persists in SF, as elsewhere, that women are naturally gentler than men, that they are naturally less creative than men, or less intelligent, or shrewder, or more cowardly, or more dependent, or more self-centered, or more self-sacrificing, or more materialistic, or shyer, or God knows what, whatever is most convenient at the moment.”
― Joanna Russ, Again, Dangerous Visions

“It seems to me (in the words of the narrator) that sexual equality has not yet been established on Earth and that (in the words of GBS) the only argument that can be made against it is that it has never been tried.”
― Joanna Russ, Again, Dangerous Visions

“There are few women who go around actually feeling: Oh, what a fascinating feminine mystery I am.”
― Joanna Russ, Again, Dangerous Visions

“International Order of Odd Fellows”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions

“In the field of speculative fiction, helping out the tyros is a dues-paying activity held in only slightly less esteem than that of making money. I know of no other genre in which the established names—from the Asimovian/Bradburyian/Clarkesque upper echelons all the way down to last year’s newcomers—break their asses with such regularity and effusiveness, to assist the fledglings. Show me, if you can, another field of free-lance endeavor in which the fastest guns teach the plowboys how to outdraw them.”
― Harlan Ellison, Again, Dangerous Visions