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Clifford D. Simak Quotes
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Clifford Donald Simak was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master, and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. Wikipedia  

✵ 3. August 1904 – 25. April 1988  •  Other names Клиффорд Саймак, کلیفورد سیماک, 克利福德·D·西马克, 克利福德·D·西馬克
Clifford D. Simak photo
Clifford D. Simak: 137 quotes1 like

Clifford D. Simak Quotes

“For even if the life of my own Earth and this other Earth on which I stood had started out identically (and they might well have started out identically) there still would be, along the way, millions of little deviations, no one of which, perhaps, by itself, would be significant, but the cumulative effects of all these deviations eventually would result in a life and culture that would bear no resemblance to any other Earth.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 12 (p. 123)

“They were the misfits of the world, the outcasts, for they deviated from the norm of humanity as established through all of history. Yet it was this very deviation which made them the hope of all mankind. Ordinary human beings—the kind of human beings who had brought the race this far—were not enough today. The ordinary humans had pushed the culture forward as far as they could push it. It had served its purpose; it had brought the ordinary human as far as he could go. Now the race evolved. Now new abilities had awoke and grown—exactly as the creatures of the Earth had evolved and specialized and then evolved again from that first moment when the first feeble spark of life had come into being in the seething chemical bath of a new and madcap planet.
Twisted brains, the normal people called them; magic people, dwellers of the darkness—and could anyone say no to this? For each people set its standards for each generation and these standards and these norms were not set by any universal rule, by no all-encompassing yardstick, but by what amounted to majority agreement, with the choice arrived at through all the prejudice and bias, all the faulty thinking and the unstable logic to which all intelligence is prone.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 31 (pp. 233-234)

““You sound like a rugged individualist,” said Webster.
“You say that like you think it’s funny,” yapped the mayor.
“I do think it’s funny,” said Webster. “Funny, and tragic, that anyone should think that way today.”
“The world would be a lot better off with some rugged individualism,” snapped the mayor. “Look at the men who have gone places—”
“Meaning yourself?” asked Weber.
“You might take me, for example,” Carter agreed. “I worked hard. I took advantage of opportunity. I had some foresight. I did—”
“You mean you licked the correct boots and stepped in the proper faces,” said Webster. “You’re the shining example of the kind of people the world doesn’t want today. You positively smell musty, your ideas are so old. You’re the last of the politicians, Carter, just as I was the last of the Chamber of Commerce secretaries. Only you don’t know it yet. I did. I got out. Even when it cost me something, I got out, because I had to save my self-respect. Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology any more. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.””

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 1, “City” (pp. 34-35)

“For this, he realized, was the future. It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened—an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark; there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place—until this very moment when he and his machine had been thrust upon it, intruders who had overstepped their time.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 33 (pp. 174-175)

“In the east the moon was rising, a full moon that lighted the landscape so that he could see every little clump of bushes, every grove of trees. And as he stood there, he realized with a sudden start that the moon was full again, that it was always full, it rose with the setting of the sun and set just before the sun came up, and it was always a great pumpkin of a moon, an eternal harvest moon shining on an eternal autumn world.
The realization that this was so all at once seemed shocking. How was it that he had never noticed this before? Certainly he had been here long enough, had watched the moon often enough to have noticed it. He had been here long enough — and how long had that been, a few weeks, a few months, a year? He found he did not know. He tried to figure back and there was no way to figure back. There were no temporal landmarks. Nothing ever happened to mark one day from the next. Time flowed so smoothly and so uneventfully that it might as well stand still.”

Clifford D. Simak

“The Autumn Land” (p. 251)
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

“You sometimes get a thrill at knowing where you are. You’re often filled with wonder, but more often you are puzzled. You are reminded, again and yet again, of how insignificant you are. And there are times when you forget that you are human. You’re just a blob of life—brother to everything that ever existed or ever will exist.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 9 (p. 69)

“McKay tells me that you went home sick,” she said. “Personally, I hope you don’t survive.”

Clifford D. Simak

“Skirmish” (p. 44); originally published in Amazing Stories, December 1950
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

““Anita,” he asked, “are there really werewolves?”
“Yes,” she told him. “Your werewolves are down there.”
And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 34 (p. 263)

“We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe…”

Clifford D. Simak book A Heritage of Stars

A Heritage of Stars (1977)

“This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it—and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, any dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and the viewpoint of men who’d long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life—life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 11 (p. 87)

“Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists…”

Clifford D. Simak book Shakespeare's Planet

Shakespeare's Planet (1976)

“The Talisman could be operated only by certain beings with certain types of minds and something else besides (could it be, he wondered, with certain kinds of souls?). "Sensitives" was the word he had used in his mental translation of the term for these kinds of people, but once again, he could not be sure if the word came close to fitting. The Talisman was placed in the custody of the most capable, or the most efficient, or the most devoted (whichever it might be) of the galactic sensitives, who carried it from star to star in a sort of eternal progression. And on each planet the people came to make personal and individual contact with the spiritual force through the intervention and the agency of the Talisman and its custodian.
He found that he was shivering at the thought of it — the pure ecstasy of reaching out and touching the spirituality that flooded through the galaxy and, undoubtedly, through the universe. The assurance would be there, he thought, the assurance that life had a special place in the great scheme of existence, that one, no matter how small, how feeble, how insignificant, still did count for something in the vast sweep of space and time.”

Clifford D. Simak book Way Station

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 12

“It was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than as a person.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 32 (pp. 245-246)

“First there was space—endless, limitless space, so far from everything, so brutal, so frigid, so uncaring that it numbed the mind, not so much from fear or loneliness as from the realization that in this eternity of space the thing that was himself was dwarfed to an insignificance no yardstick could measure.”

Clifford D. Simak

“The Thing in the Stone” (p. 220)
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)

“If there could only be more time, he thought. But, of course, there never was. There was not the time right now and there would never be. No matter how many centuries he might be able to devote, there'd always be so much more knowledge than he'd gathered at the moment that the little he had gathered would always seem a pittance.”

Clifford D. Simak book Way Station

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 23

“The Talisman has been missing for several years or so. And no one knows about it — except Galactic Central and the — what would you call it?”

Clifford D. Simak book Way Station

the hierarchy, I suppose, the organization of mystics who takes care of the spiritual setup. And yet, even with no one knowing, the galaxy is beginning to show wear. It's coming apart at the seams. In time to come, it may fall apart. As if the Talisman represented a force that all unknowingly held the races of the galaxy together, exerting its influence even when it remained unseen.
Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 21

“… his work gradually became identifiably Simakian — constrained, intensely emotional beneath a calmly competent Genre SF surface; tales deeply Pastoral in the sense that his idylls, his Edens, were almost inevitably supported by some superior civilization, sometimes urban… <…”

Clifford D. Simak

““… I said about limiting factors. Well, there’s one that you can’t beat. Put steel under fifty thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet’s surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.” <…>”

Clifford D. Simak

Из малой прозы

“There is a streak of cruelty <…> that runs through the human race. You find it everywhere you look, on every page of recorded history. Man is not satisfied with inflicting death alone, he must inflict it with many painful frills. A boy pulls the wings off flies and ties tin cans to a dog's tail. The Assyrians flayed screaming thousands while they were still alive. <…> The Aztecs <…> cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices with a blunt stone knife. The Saxons threw men into the serpent pits or flayed them living and rubbed salt into the quivering flesh as the pelt peeled off.”

Clifford D. Simak

Из малой прозы

“The situation outlined is immaterial to us. We could help humanity, but there is no reason that we should. Humanity is a transient factor and is none of our concern.”

Clifford D. Simak book A Choice of Gods

Source: A Choice of Gods (1972), Chapter 22 (p. 130)

“It seems to be a social axiom that as misery and privation increase for the many, the few rise ever higher in luxury and comfort, feeding on the misery. Not aware, perhaps, that they feed upon the misery, not with any wish of feeding on it—but they do.”

Clifford D. Simak book A Choice of Gods

Source: A Choice of Gods (1972), Chapter 6 (p. 46)

“These kind never change. The machine does something to a man. It brutalizes him. It serves as a buffer between himself and his environment and he is the worst for it. It arouses an opportunistic instinct and makes possible a greed that makes a man inhuman.”

Clifford D. Simak book A Choice of Gods

Source: A Choice of Gods (1972), Chapter 28 (p. 152)