Fritz Leiber: Quotes about people

Fritz Leiber was American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Explore interesting quotes on people.

Fritz Leiber: 134 quotes2 likes

“I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 3.

“What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence — liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 42 (p. 340).

“Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.”

Fritz Leiber book The Big Time

The Big Time (1958)

“Besides, what difference did if make if there had been two genuine coincidences? The universe was full of them. Every molecular collision was a coincidence. You could pile a thousand coincidences on top of another, he averred, and not get Tom Digby one step nearer to believing in the supernatural. Oh, he knew intelligent people enough, all right, who coddled such beliefs. Some of his best friends liked to relate “yarns” and toy with eerie possibilities for the sake of a thrill. But the only emotion Tom ever got out of such stuff was a nauseating disgust. It cut too deep for joking. It was a reversion to that primitive, fear-bound ignorance from which science had slowly lifted man, inch by inch, against the most bitter opposition.”

“The Hill and the Hole” (p. 165); originally published in Unknown Worlds, August 1942
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

“I thought of how people are like planets—lonely little forts of mind with immense black distance barring them off from each other.”

“A Bit of the Dark World” (p. 263)
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

““Conscience is only social pressure,” he told her, tense without quite knowing why, “the impulse to submerge your ego in that of the herd, and do what other people want you to because you’re afraid of their censure. Realistic self-interest frees a person from the childish restrictions of conscience.”
“Are you sure of that, Jarles? What about your dreams? Conscience may be partly what you say it is, but it’s more than that. It’s hearkening to the wisest thoughts that have occurred to the minds of the human race.””

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 14 (pp. 145-146)

“Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted ‘communications industry’ had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 21 (p. 158).