Robert Silverberg: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

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

Universe

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

Robert Silverberg

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

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

Robert Silverberg

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

Behavior

“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.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

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

Hate , Truth , Soul , Learning

“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.”

Robert Silverberg

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

Hell , Thinking

“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.”

Robert Silverberg

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

World , Communication , Sun , Dead

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

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

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

“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.”

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

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

People , Family , Confidence , Sense

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

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

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

Life

“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.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

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

“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.”

Robert Silverberg

Short fiction, Homefaring (1983)

Intelligence , Time

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

Robert Silverberg

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

Books , World

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

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.”

Robert Silverberg

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

Religion , Heart , Dead , 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.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

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

Mathematics , Knowledge , Universe

“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.”

Robert Silverberg

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

Love , Way

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

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

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

“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.”

Robert Silverberg

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

Life

“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!”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

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

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

Robert Silverberg

Section 1
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

Science