The Listeners Quotes

“We must have tranquillity.”  “In a technological world,” MacDonald said, “change is inevitable. What you must have for tranquillity is reasonable change, manageable change.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“Some of us wish to pass on our hatreds, our battles, not something new but something old. But life changes, time passes, and we must give our children the future, not the past—or if the past, only the past as it affects the future. The past is not irrelevant, but we can't live there; the only place we can live in is the future, and it is the only thing we can change. Believe me: once the answer is sent, peace will come to the world.”  “Why then?”  “For one thing, it will be done, over. The people who are quarreling now will realize that they are human beings, that the different creatures are out there; that if we can talk with them, why shouldn't we communicate with each other, even those who speak different languages and believe in different gods....”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“Logic is our assurance,” MacDonald said calmly. “The only thing worth sending from star to star is information, and the certain profit from such an exchange far outweighs the uncertain advantage from any other kind of behavior. The first benefit is the knowledge of other intelligent creatures in the universe—this alone gives us strength and courage. Then comes information from an alien world; it is like having our own instruments there, even our own scientists, to measure and record, only with the additional advantage of a breadth and duration of measurements under a variety of conditions. Finally comes the cultural and scientific knowledge and development of another race, and the treasure to be gained from this kind of exchange is beyond calculation.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“You have spent your life among scholarly men of good will. To you the universe is a benevolent place; it has treated you with kindness, or, at least, neutrality. I have seen passion and malice and greed, and I know that intelligence is not necessarily benevolent; in fact, in my experience, it is more likely to be merely an instrument in the persistent search for advantage, in weighing profit and loss and finding a means of maximizing profit and minimizing loss.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“He thought how wonderful it would be if he could take off his shoes and walk barefooted in the grass the way he used to do in the park when he was a boy. What a fine picture that would be—the President walking barefooted on the White House lawn—and he knew if he did it the picture would be reproduced in one hundred million homes across the nation and the world and it would win him votes. The people liked to think of the President being a bit impulsive when it came to matters of the heart, a bit comic in domestic affairs, a bit inferior to each of them in some way....”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“I, too, have had my revelation. I do not compare it with yours. It has no identifiable source. It is an inner conviction that has grown from a small thought to a large certainty that there is other life in the universe, that to prove its existence is the most gloriously human thing man can do, that to communicate with it would make this vast, incomprehensible place in which man lives, this unexplored forest of the night, a friendlier, happier, more wonderful, more exciting, holier place in which to be.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“In a universe whose size is beyond human imagining, where our world floats like a dust mote in the void of night, men have grown inconceivably lonely. We scan the time scale and the mechanisms of life itself for portents and signs of the invisible. As the only thinking mammals on the planet—perhaps the only thinking animals in the entire sidereal universe—the burden of consciousness has grown heavy upon us. We watch the stars, but the signs are uncertain. We uncover the bones of the past and seek for our origins. There is a path there, but it appears to wander. The vagaries of the road may have a meaning, however; it is thus we torture ourselves....  Loren Eiseley, 1946...”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“White turned the sheet of paper around and looked at it for several seconds. Then he began to laugh.  After a few moments, MacDonald said, “What's funny?”  White's laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I wasn't laughing at the answer. I don't begin to understand half of what's here. But that's obviously a father and a mother. and a son—a child—and the Capellans would have no way of knowing whether they were white or black.”  When he and John had returned to Washington, what would he say to John? That he had ordered a great man to hide his greatness, to destroy what he had built? He knew what that would do to John, what it would do to their relationship. On the one hand he preached leadership of the revolution; on the other, he rejected leadership in others.  "It's only your own vision you can see,” John would say. “To others’ visions you are blind."  What would he say? What if John was right?  What if the revolution were done, as much as leaders could do for it, and now it was up to the individual? What if the important battle now was to allow individual greatness once more to be expressed, to open up society again?”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“The important task of government, you see, is to keep conditions stable, to hold down disturbances and unrest, to maintain itself, and the best way to do that is to give everybody the opportunity to do what they want—except change things.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“Poverty and injustice are evils, but they are endurable evils in a world where other problems are greater. They are not endurable in a complex, technological society where cooperation is essential, where violence and rioting can destroy a city, even civilization itself.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“campaign of information about the Project and the Message and the Answer....”  “Might ease the fears,” White said, “and might reinforce them.”  “The fears are not logical. Facts will dispel them.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“Do they think the same way we think—in terms of advantage and disadvantage, in terms of profit and loss, in terms of victory and defeat, in terms of what's in it for me?”  MacDonald looked at White much, White thought, as he had been looking at the picture. He shook his head. “They seem very peaceful to me. All of us don't think in terms of advantage, of conflict. Increasingly, I think we become more uncompetitive. And birds always have been a symbol of peace.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“Being in that room was like being inside a computer, a modern Jonah inside a great fish not yet born, and he was relieved when it opened a mouth and spat them out into an office.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners

“Mr. President, Dr. MacDonald is right. You're making a mistake. This is a scientific decision, not a political decision.”  White shook his head slowly, sorrowfully. “Everything is political. But that's why I'm going to the Project, to give Dr. MacDonald a chance to convince me I'm wrong.”
― James Edwin Gunn, The Listeners