Robert Silverberg Quotes page 2

“I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen.”

Section 5
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 1, Chapter 15 (p. 113)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 17 (p. 62)

“Not all lawyers are annoying. Some are dead.”

“What value is lineage to a drowning man?”

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 476

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 40 (p. 142)

“It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 7 (p. 21)

“Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.”

“I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?”

Introduction to New Dimensions 1, edited by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 29 (p. 162)

“Research, he calls it. Research.”

“But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition.”

Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!”
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”
Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

Robert Silverberg book The World Inside

Source: The World Inside (1971), Chapter 7 (p. 483)

“Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you.”

Robert Silverberg book The World Inside

Source: The World Inside (1971), Chapter 6 (p. 451)

“When you treat a rational autonomous creature as though he’s a mere beast, what does that make you?”

Robert Silverberg book Downward to the Earth

Source: Downward to the Earth (1970), Chapter 7 (p. 231)

“She was strikingly ignorant, but he had known that from the start. What he had not known was how quickly her ignorance would cease to seem charming and would begin to seem contemptible.”

“She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.”

Source: Thorns (1967), Chapter 21, “And Southward Aye We Fled” (p. 106)

“The fascination of what’s difficult,” said Chalk. “It spins the world on its bearings.”

Source: Thorns (1967), Chapter 18, “To the Toy Fair” (p. 85)

“I have come to prefer something looser, a rough sort of definition which says simply that science fiction attempts to portray that which does not exist, a speculative reality, but endeavors to explore the consequences of such a speculation in a rigorous, systematic, and scientifically plausible way.”

Source: Thorns (1967), Chapter 1, “The Song the Neurons Sang” (p. 7)

“Only a man who doubts his own bravery bristles when called a coward.”

Introduction (p. vi)
Thorns (1967)

“Like all bureaucrats, he was bewildered by an unpredictable development.”

Source: The Gate of Worlds (1967), Chapter 7 “We Play a Little Game” (p. 122)

“The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die.”

Source: The Gate of Worlds (1967), Chapter 2 “The Realm of Moctezuma XII” (p. 33)

Robert Silverberg book The Book of Skulls

Source: The Book of Skulls (1972), Chapter 15 (p. 62)

“Morality after the fact is worse than no morality at all.”

Robert Silverberg book The Book of Skulls

Source: The Book of Skulls (1972), Chapter 7 (p. 25)

“A man who lies to himself is the worst liar of all.”

“I felt an unmanly pity for the beasts we slew, for I fear I don’t really have the killer instinct. I don’t have the starving instinct either, though, and so I fired away.”

Source: The Gate of Worlds (1967), Chapter 9 “To the Western Sea” (p. 162)

“Take this as a bit of easy wisdom: people who try to rule over other people are going to be hated.”

Source: The Gate of Worlds (1967), Chapter 9 “To the Western Sea” (p. 158)