Olaf Stapledon Quotes

William Olaf Stapledon – known as Olaf Stapledon – was a British philosopher and author of science fiction. In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. May 1886 – 6. September 1950

Works

Star Maker
Star Maker
Olaf Stapledon
Last and First Men
Last and First Men
Olaf Stapledon
Last Men in London
Last Men in London
Olaf Stapledon
Sirius
Olaf Stapledon
Odd John
Olaf Stapledon
Olaf Stapledon: 113   quotes 2   likes

Famous Olaf Stapledon Quotes

“Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.”

Source: The Seed and the Flower

“I, at any rate, acknowledge only one master, not forty-five million two-legged sheep, or two thousand million, but simply and absolutely the spirit.”

Source: Sirius (1944), Chapter XII Farmer Sirius (an answer to Plaxy's rant about democracy).

Olaf Stapledon Quotes about the world

Olaf Stapledon Quotes about space

“The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 2. Earth Among the Stars (p. 13)

Olaf Stapledon: Trending quotes

“Since then two experiences have dominated me: philosophy, and the tragic disorder of our whole terrestrial hive.”

Introduction
Philosophy and Living (1939)
Context: My childhood, which lasted some twenty-five years, was moulded chiefly by the Suez Canal, Abbotsholme, and Balliol. Since those days I have attempted several careers, in each case escaping before the otherwise inevitable disaster. First, as a schoolmaster, I swotted up Bible stories on the eve of the scripture lesson. Then, in a Liverpool shipping office, I spoiled bills of lading, and in Port Said I innocently let skippers have more coal than they needed. Next I determined to create an Educated Democracy. Workington miners, Barrow riveters, Crewe railway-men, gave me a better education than I could give them. Since then two experiences have dominated me: philosophy, and the tragic disorder of our whole terrestrial hive. After a belated attack on academic philosophy, I wrote a couple of books on philosophical subjects and several works of fantastic fiction dealing with the career of mankind. One of them, Last and First Men, is in this series.

“Throughout man's career intelligence and charity have been man's distinctive and most valuable assets.”

Philosophy and Living (1939)
Context: Throughout man's career intelligence and charity have been man's distinctive and most valuable assets. One of our early pre-human ancestors is said to have been much like the Spectral Tarsier, a little mammal about the size of a mouse, with long wiry fingers and huge forward-looking eyes adapted for binocular vision. Not by weapons but by correlation of subtle eyes and subtle hands through subtle brain, this creature triumphed. And man himself conquered the world by the same means, by attention, by discrimination, by skilled manipulation, by versatility; in fact by intelligence and imagination in adapting himself to an ever-changing environment.

Olaf Stapledon Quotes

“Chapter IV: Paul comes of age”

fragments of poems supposedly writen by Paul
Last Men in London (1932)

“Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XIV: Neptune; Section 1, “Bird’s-Eye View” (p. 206)

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

“Though all were devout, and blasphemy was regarded with horror, the general attitude to the deity was one of blasphemous commercialism.”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 3. The Prospects of the Race (p. 39)

“Long before the human spirit awoke to clear cognizance of the world and itself, it sometimes stirred in its sleep, opened bewildered eyes, and slept again.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 17)

“In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.”

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter I: The World of the Last Men.

“The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wavelengths of light.”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

“Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 4, “Cosmology” (p. 229)

“The governments hated the peace party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on war.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter III: America and China; Section 2, “The Conflict” (p. 50)

“The creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself.”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 164)

“Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.”

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 161)

“In some minds the defence of the human spirit was sincerely identified with the defence of a particular nation, conceived as the home of all enlightenment.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 3, “Europe After the Anglo-French War” (p. 26)

“Of course I don't want the old religious dope. But I don't want just the new science dope either. I want the truth.”

Source: Sirius (1944), Chapter VI Birth-pangs of a Personality

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