Robert Silverberg Quotes

“They were apt to be disappointed with the way he fulfilled his promises to them, for he intended, if he could, to sweep both the bickering rivals from power. But he did not ask pure and total saintliness of himself in his dealings with those whose chief role in the government appeared to be to impede and obstruct.”

“I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?”

Book 4 “The Book of the Labyrinth”, Chapter 7 (p. 383)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power.”

Section 4
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

“It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality.”

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 6, “The Woman Who Is Sore at Heart Reproaches Thomas” (p. 91)

“I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.”

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 16 (p. 98)

Robert Silverberg Quotes about space

“The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.”

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 2 (pp. 13-14)

“We are born by accident into a purely random universe.”

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 12, section 4 (p. 179)

“I’m asking you to do an unpleasant thing for a decent motive. You don’t want to do it, and I understand how you feel, but I’m trying to get you to see that your personal moral code isn’t always the highest factor. In wartime, a soldier shoots to kill because the universe imposes that situation on him. It may be an unjust war, and that might be his brother in the ship he’s aiming at, but the war is real and he has his role.”
“Where’s the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?”
“There isn’t any. That’s why I say the universe stinks.”
“We have no freedom at all?”
“The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.”
“Have you felt this way all your life?”
“Most of it,” Boardman said.
“When you were my age?”

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 1, (p. 1; opening words)

““I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”
“It doesn’t have to stink!” Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. “Is that the lesson you’ve learned in all those years? The universe doesn’t stink. Man stinks! And he does it by voluntary choice because he’d rather stink than smell sweet! We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to cheat. We could opt for honor and decency and—” Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, “I sound young as hell to you, don’t I, Charles?”
“You’re entitled to make mistakes,” Boardman said. “That’s what being young is for.”
“You genuinely believe and know that there’s a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?”
Boardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. “I wouldn’t put it that way. There’s no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there’s a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn’t give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There’s nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress it’s a stinking deal.””

“Even earlier.”
Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 73)

“You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly.”

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 72)

“You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.”

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 6, section 8 (p. 89)

Robert Silverberg: Trending quotes

“I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.”

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 8 (p. 25)

““Come,” Deliamber said. “There is a vast journey ahead of us.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t want to get up.””

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 463

“Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul.”

Book 3 “The Book of the Isle of Sleep”, Chapter 2 (p. 231)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

Robert Silverberg Quotes

“He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for…although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.”

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 31 (p. 110)

“Love of others begins with love of self.”

Source: Short fiction, Against Babylon (1986), p. 276

“Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.”

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 35 (p. 126)

“They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is is that Entropy Eventually Wins.”

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 7 (p. 27)

“When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!”

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 76)

““You speak very generally,” Valentine said.
“I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly.”

In Star Science Fiction 5, edited by Frederik Pohl, p. 53
Short fiction, Company Store (1959)

“The cages are ready in case any of the enemies are captured.”
“You mean us?”
“Yes. Enemies.” Muller’s eyes glittered with sudden paranoid fury; it was alarming how easily he slipped from rational discourse to that cold blaze. “Homo sapiens. The most dangerous, the most ruthless, the most despicable beast in the universe!”
“You say it as if you believe it.”

Book 1, Chapter 12 (p. 93)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

““Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!”
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!””

“I do.”
Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 8 (p. 118)

“Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.”

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

“Stand near me and you get sick. Why? It reminds you that you’re an animal too, because you get a full dose of me. So we go round and round in our endless feedback. You hate me because you learn things about your own soul by getting near me. And I hate you because you must draw back from me. What I am, you see, is a plague carrier, and the plague I carry is the truth. My message is that it’s a lucky thing for humanity that we’re shut up each in his own skull. Because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurry nonverbal thing I’ve got, we’d be unable to stand each other. Human society would be impossible.”

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 443

“I don't know, Mattison thinks. That’s cool. I don't know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to hell with it.”

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 8 (p. 120)

“Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract developments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet.”

Source: Short fiction, Hot Times in Magma City (1995), p. 104

“All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context.”

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“The Barjazid does not yet rule as an absolute tyrant, for that might turn the people against him, and he is still insecure in his power—while you live. But he rules for himself and for his family, not for Majipoor. He lacks a sense of right, and does only what seems useful and expedient. As his confidence grows, so too will his crimes, until Majipoor groans under the whip of a monster.”

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 31 (p. 110)

“All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.”

Book 3, Chapter 11 (p. 329)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“The style in which it was written told me much: I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice.”

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 53 (p. 168)

“It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus.”

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 27 (p. 89)

“She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.”

Short fiction, Homefaring (1983)

“Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.”

Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 79

Robert Silverberg book Up the Line

Source: Up the Line (1969), Chapter 4

“May I be struck dead for saying this if I don’t mean it with all my heart: I wish the Lord and all his prophets would disappear and leave us alone. We’ve had enough religion for one season.”

“In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.”

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 11, “The March to the Sea” (p. 110)

“As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational.”

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 3 (p. 11)

“My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles.”

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 77)

“My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—as playing chess.”

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 70 (p. 204)

“How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!”

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

“It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty.”

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 25 (p. 85)

“He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer.”

Section 1
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

“But why?” he asked Deliamber.
The Vroon replied, “Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress.”

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.”

Book 3, Chapter 8 (p. 301)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.”

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 29 (p. 161)

“We are not accustomed to threats here,” Lorivade declared.
“I make no threat. I speak only of inevitable consequences.”

"Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal" in Hell's Cartographers (1975) edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison

“Am I loyal, or am I loyal? But I don’t like the way things are going. It’s a citizen’s right to worry about the state of the realm, isn’t it? If matters are not to our liking, we should speak up. That’s our tradition, isn’t it? If we allow small abuses now, who knows what sort of things he’ll be doing five years on!”

Book 3, Chapter 10 (p. 317)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.”

Book 1 “The Book of the King of Dreams”, Chapter 8 (p. 48)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.”

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 13 (p. 73)

“Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.””

Section 5
Short fiction, Hawksbill Station (1967)

“How frail, he thought, is the compact that holds our government together! Good will alone is all that sustains it.”

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

“Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody’s thought it.”

Book 5, Chapter 6 (p. 442)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“I never became a believer. I had a natural predisposition toward skepticism. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t there. That included not only Old Whiskers and His Only Begotten Son, but all the other mystic baggage that people liked to carry around in those tense credulous years: the flying saucers, Zen Buddhism, the Atlantis cult, Hare Krishna, macrobiotics, telepathy and other species of extrasensory perception, theosophy, entropy-worship, astrology, and such. I was willing to accept neutrinos, quasars, the theory of continental drift, and the various species of quarks, because I respected the evidence for their existence; I couldn’t buy the other stuff, the irrational stuff, the assorted opiates of the masses, When the Moon is in the seventh house, etc., etc.—sorry, no.”

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

““This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.”
“So?”
“What do I need it for?”
“Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.””

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 76)

“Forget it. No, don’t forget it. Don’t forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense.”

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 8 (p. 33)

“Never pass by a chance to shut up.”

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 3 (p. 18)

“Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.”

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 477

“No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.”

Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 80

“What matters,” he said earnestly, “is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience.”

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 12 (p. 55)

“Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?”
“The Divine—”
“Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.””

Book 1, Chapter 10 (p. 71)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“Moas aren’t very bright,” Gracchus answers. “That’s one good reason why they became extinct.”

Book 5 “The Book of the Castle”, Chapter 4 (pp. 424-425)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people.”

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big fire storm. There were times that he almost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy, tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick, choking, glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, he thought. Even the mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets. He sometimes felt that the trashiness bothered him more than the out-and-out evil. If you kept sight of your own values you could do battle with evil, but trashiness slipped up around you and infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him.”

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 3 (p. 17)

“The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.”

Source: Short fiction, Against Babylon (1986), p. 264