The Sound of Thunder Quotes

“And yet, and yet, she thought, if you stop looking for a mystical or religious meaning to life, then you live in a world of blacks and grays and whites, without color. You live in a world of despair and violence; a cold hell without values or escape or significance”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Margaret said, “You and Robert are good children. You are the only good things in this house. You are the only good things that ever happened to your father. He’ll realize that, one of these days. He doesn’t know yet that to give anybody everything that person thinks he wants is to do him the worst injury in the world.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“These friends of his now in this room, believed absolutely with the millions of their kind that only the State was adequate to control and direct, with force and coercion—ah, particularly force!—the vast chaotic condition of mankind. And who would be the State? The intellectuals, the innately powerful, with an army of bureaucrats to enforce their superior ideas and directives on the unthinking and mindless masses.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Sometimes I agree with Ed: men are less loyal than dogs, less innocent than wolves, less courageous than mice, less kind than tigers. Less worthy to be alive.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Do you know what I’ve been taught all my life, by my father? That God is an abstract; that He is a symbol of the good in men. In men, hear that? That men themselves are really God, all by their filthy, contemptible, treacherous, malicious, and cruel selves! I learned all about Rousseau from my father—”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“All work is important,” said Padraig, and he looked at Edward with compassion. “It is as important to men to lay bricks and mortar as it is to listen to a symphony or to read a book. To labor is to pray, no matter the labor. I am thinking that the Divine Lord in reality blessed men when He ‘condemned’ them to labor with the sweat of their brows. Does not He Himself labor endlessly, and His angels with Him? I do not believe that heaven is all tranquillity, containing nothing but light and song. It would not be heaven then.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Now God created men, and as He created them, they were perfect. It is Satan who is bedeviling them and leading them into the abattoirs—by their own will, their own greed, their own evil, their own hatred of their fellow men, with which Lucifer inspired them.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“A thousand years, says He, I’ll be bound. Not I, Lucifer, Star of the Morning. I’ve got a cleverer mind than He has, because I believe in nothing and hate everything.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“How could I have forgotten how children really are? Margaret asked herself miserably. They have no real innocence or kindness. They have no gentleness or consideration of understanding.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Men aren’t mathematical equations; they can’t be measured by scientific instruments. No man has the identical aims, emotions, passions, loves, and desires, as another man has. Every man is unique, because he is an immortal soul. He shares in God’s infinite variety, which is never duplicated. He is beyond science; only his body is the field of the biologist.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Armies, and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“William was correct in saying that governments are the historical enemies of men.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Liberty’s new in the world, and the plotters are afraid of it. Government is ancient, and it takes its directives from hell.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“The government, that bloody enemy of men, gets its sticky fingers in your pocket and takes a farthing one day, a bob the next, a quid the next, and then all your cash, and then all your freedom’s gone and it’s bars and bolted doors for you if you try to keep your property. Property’s tied up with liberty; read your own Constitution! Property goes,” and he threw out his hands, “and liberty goes.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“What was it your Benjamin Franklin said, to the effect that a man who gives up his freedom for a little temporary security deserves neither freedom nor security?”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Modern medicine keeps the idiots alive, to perpetuate themselves.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“However, when had men not been stupid? They were conceived in ignorance, lived in ignorance, and died in ignorance.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“if Socialism ever came to America, as it had come to a few other nations, then the power of America would die”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Socialism, she said to herself, was only the revenge the inadequate could inflict upon the strong.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Who was it that had said, “Beware of the wrath of a patient man”?”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Remember my own school days; the brightest boys turned out to be bookkeepers or clerks later; the dull boys, or the boys the teachers thought were dull, are the ones now splashing around in golden fountains, or writing the great books or painting the fine pictures or managing big corporations.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“But among us, in every generation, are born some bear-eyed barbarians who cannot comprehend music or the philosophic laughter or the noble tenets of Christianity.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Only a civilized man, born of civilized ancestors, can really laugh at—things. And even life. Barbarians can only get drunk, and fight, and they’re serious as all hell, like other animals.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“A man who worships things can’t ever be taught to worship abstractions.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Thing-worshipers. Not idea-worshipers.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“He mistrusted “tolerance.” He and his race suffered more from the hypocritical “tolerance” of the North than they had ever suffered in the “lynching” South.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“The Voice sounded as if it came from over vast spaces, echoing like muted thunder, but still it was very close, as close as breathing.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder

“Thing-worshipers. Not idea-worshipers. A man who worships things can’t ever be taught to worship abstractions.”
― Taylor Caldwell, The Sound of Thunder