Robert Silverberg: Trending quotes

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

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

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“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?”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

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

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

“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)

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

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

“Never pass by a chance to shut up.”

“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)