When They Come from Space Quotes

“Good-by, now. When you all have figgered out how to sail across space to our shores, you'll find yourselves just as welcome as the people who come to your shores.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“You can be against sin, but there's no real fun in it until you've gone out and located yourself some sinners.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“Oh darn, oh gracious, oh fudge," I said. "To heck with those people!" [This isn't really what I said, but our United States Post Office Department, itself far gone in the syndrome of self-righteousness, has determined that the American public is much too young to be told how people really talk and behave, not if we expect to use their post offices for distributing our horrid books.]”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“Their values were formed by a universe almost totally devoid of life –where every scrap of it was so precious that its right to survive must transcend all else, the right to be must transcend the difference in being.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“It provides excuse for anything we may want to do in the destruction of others. We know it well. We should. We've had plenty of experience with it. We know it in all its stages of progression. We know it is a contagion and an addiction. We know it to be worse than any narcotic habit, for it can only feed upon forbidding and condemning others in ever increasing doses, to increase its own self-approval.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“The most despicable of all human traits," I said, "the most cruel and mean, is self-righteousness, the belief that there is some special virtue in ourselves which enables us to decide what is best for others.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“Their faces were designed to reflect the morning after the night before.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“All right for the censors to observe them, for the censors could be confident that their minds were pure, but no such trust could be placed in those with inferior morals.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“they relaxed before going to bed –single beds, of course, installed under the strict supervision of F.B.I. who were doing their best to make sure these handsome, single men from the stars indulged in no nonconformist sex behavior while guests of this Earth and subject to association with government officials.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“At the dinners and receptions the human males had worn their symbolic tails, the females had shown off the old dead scraps skinned from slaughtered rodents to display the hunting prowess of their males in the widows-and-orphans fleecing marts or under the graft table. The social events symbolizing the progress of a flowering civilization were over for the night.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“When I was a kid," I said, and looked back in memory to a long time ago, "I used to dream about the time when we would meet some other life intelligence face to face. I was pretty innocent, I guess. Because, in that imagining, I always saw Man standing straight and proud –and I was so proud of him.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“Precedent for one person's being different from another person, and therefore not having the same rights. Wow! Nineteen sixty here we come, right back where we started from! Make that eighteen sixty. Or seventeen, or sixteen, or any goddam century you want to name.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“The Starmen weren't men, well, not human men, anyhow. Wow! Suppose that goddam Supreme Court had to distinguish between a man's rights, and a –well, whatever they were. What a precedent that one would set. Because then that precedent could be used to settle other questions, such as, well, such as –is a Negro really a man? Wow!”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“I knew how little it took to turn an overwrought, tense collection of individuals into a ravening mob, all acting in one accord of insane fury, possessed by a superentity created through interaction and feedback of emotions, given brief life of uncalculated power, taking possession of the individuals, turning them into body cells of the entity, playing out the tragic role before the individual mind could recoil in horror from its acts, shatter the group accord and destroy the entity –after the deed had been done.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“Of course science fiction was now old enough, traditional enough, and therefore respectable enough that it was no longer scorned by the literary elite. And, seventy-eighty years later, Dr. Gaffee had learned, in his early research, what the pioneer writers and fans of that literature had known all along; that not only did it provide the power thrust to enable the mind to take off and soar into the unknown geographies of undiscovered mental continents, but that it was virtually the only way this could be done.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“Perhaps, without realizing it, I actually had developed –well, if not an open mind, one which was at least cracked.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“My gorge rose in revulsion, I fought for detachment; to still my atavistic fears; to remind myself that man had created the dread forces of Evil out of his own sick imaginings, even as he had created the forces of Good out of his noble aspirations. It did no good. This was materialization of something basically, inherently Evil, no sickness of the imagination.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“First rule: We cannot harm intelligent life." "First question: How do we know we've found some?”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“There are those who milk, and those born to be milked; those who slaughter, and those who line up for the slaughtering.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“Apparently my real mission was to be concealed. Ostensibly my job was to train extraterrestrials vocationally and put them to work in self-respecting employment –if we ever did discover any. My real mission, of course, was to drive them away before anybody found out they'd been here;”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“You have a responsibility to the taxpayers not to use anything you have learned outside of government service. Where to get the proper computer would be that kind of misuse of special knowledge.”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space

“First rule of government of the people, by the people, for the people: Never tell the people!”
― Mark Clifton, When They Come From Space