A Case of Conscience Quotes

“I will be the first. As of tonight, I renounce my citizenship in the United Nations, and my allegiance to the Shelter state. From now on I will be a citizen--a citizen of no country but that bounded by the limits of my own mind. I do not know what those limits are, and I may never find out, but I shall devote my life to searching for them, in whatever manner seems good to me, and in no other manner whatsoever.
You must do the same. Tear up your registration cards. If you are asked your serial number, tell them you never had one. Never fill in another form. Stay above ground when the siren sounds. Stake out plots; grow crops; abandon the corridors. Do not commit any violence; simply refuse to obey. Nobody has the. right to compel you, as non-citizens. Passivity is the key. Renounce, resist, deny!”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“The omelette tasted like flannel.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“I expect that in the long run, when we get right down to the fundamental stuff of the universe, we’ll find that there’s nothing there at all—just nothings moving no-place through no-time. On the day that that happens, I’ll have God and you will not—otherwise there’ll be no difference between us.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“Ruiz-Sanchez did not believe that the hand of God would reach forth to pluck to salvation men who were involved in such a project as Cleaver's, but he was equally convinced that his should not be the hand to condemn any man to death, let alone to an unshriven death.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“I don't see why my belief in a God you can't accept is any more rarefied than Mike's vision of the atom as a-hole-inside-a-hole-through-a-hole. I expect that in the long run, when we get right down to the fundamental stuff of the universe, we'll find that there's nothing there at all--just nothings moving no-place through no-time. On the day that that happens, I'll have God and you will not--otherwise there'll be no difference between us.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“[A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
The residuum was faith.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“The smokes had the reputation of being nonaddicting, which for the most part they were—but they were certainly habit-forming, which is quite a different thing, and not necessarily less dangerous.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“When on the last night of his lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in that hollow of mosses where there was the most dimness, he knew in his blood that on the morrow, when he awoke into his doom as a thinking creature, he would be old with that age which curses those who have never even for an instant been young. Tomorrow he would be a thinking creature, but the weariness was on him tonight....”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“[A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience