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Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

Theodore Sturgeon was an American writer, primarily of fantasy, science fiction and horror. He was also a critic. He wrote approximately 400 reviews and more than 200 stories.

Sturgeon's most famous work may be the science fiction novel More Than Human , an expansion of "Baby Is Three" . More Than Human won the 1954 International Fantasy Award as the year's best novel and the Science Fiction Writers of America ranked "Baby is Three" number five among the "Greatest Science Fiction Novellas of All Time" to 1964. Ranked by votes for all of their pre-1965 novellas, Sturgeon was second among authors, behind Robert Heinlein.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Sturgeon in 2000, its fifth class of two deceased and two living writers.

✵ 26. February 1918 – 8. May 1985

Works

Venus Plus X
Venus Plus X
Theodore Sturgeon
More Than Human
More Than Human
Theodore Sturgeon
Microcosmic God
Microcosmic God
Theodore Sturgeon
Venus Plus X
Venus Plus X
Theodore Sturgeon
More Than Human
More Than Human
Theodore Sturgeon
Microcosmic God
Microcosmic God
Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon: 44 quotes1 like

Famous Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

“Live long and prosper”

Theodore Sturgeon

Source: Amok Time

“Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?”

Theodore Sturgeon book E Pluribus Unicorn

Source: E Pluribus Unicorn

“90% of everything is crap.”

Theodore Sturgeon

Venture Science Fiction (March 1958) The original expression of this has often been declared to have been "Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud. That's because ninety percent of everything is crud." According to Philip Klass Sturgeon made the remark during a talk at New York University around 1951. It has also commonly appeared in variant forms such as "Ninety percent of everything is crap" and is often referred to as "Sturgeon's Law" — though he himself gave that title to another phrase:
Variant: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Context: I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud.
The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.
Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.

“Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.”

Theodore Sturgeon

As quoted in an interview with David Duncan http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/duncan.html <br class="br">Context: Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called &quot;other&quot;, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.

“Nothing is always absolutely so”

Theodore Sturgeon

“There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.”

Theodore Sturgeon book E Pluribus Unicorn

Source: E Pluribus Unicorn

Theodore Sturgeon Quotes about people

“Father-dominated people who form father-dominated cultures have father-religions: a male deity, an authoritative scripture, a strong central government, an intolerance for inquiry and research, a repressive sexual attitude, a deep conservatism (for one does not change what Father built), a rigid demarcation, in dress and conduct, between the sexes, and a profound horror of homosexuality.
Mother-dominated people who form mother-dominated cultures have mother religions: a female deity served by priestesses, a liberal government—one which feeds the masses and succors the helpless—a great tolerance for experimental thought, a permissive attitude toward sex, a hazy boundary between the insignes of the sexes, and a dread of incest.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 43 (pp. 131-132)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 1, p. 60

“Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 181

“A pig among people is a pig, he tells himself, but a pig among pigs is people.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 38 (p. 118)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“There were a lot of people living in his time who never did latch on to the idea that the curve of technological progress was not a flat slanting line like a diving board, but a geometrical curve like a ski-jump. These wistful and mixed-up souls were always suffering from attacks of belated conservatism, clutching suddenly at this dying thing and that, trying to keep it or bring it back. It wasn’t real conservatism at all, of course, but an unthought longing for the dear old days when one could predict what would be there tomorrow, if not next week. Unable to get the big picture, they welcomed the conveniences, the miniaturization of this and the speed of that, and then were angrily confused when their support of these things changed their world.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 11 (p. 33)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“I remember wondering smokily whether anyone ever loves a person. People seem to love dreams instead, and for the lucky ones, the person is close to the dream. But it’s a dream all the same, a sticky dream. You unload the person, and the dream stays with you.”

Theodore Sturgeon

Source: Short fiction, The Martian and the Moron (1949), p. 44

Theodore Sturgeon Quotes about the trip

“There is in mankind a deep and desperate necessity to feel superior. In any group there are some who genuinely are superior…but it is easy to see that within the parameters of any group, be it culture, club, nation, profession, only a few are really superior; the mass, clearly, are not.
But it is the will of the mass that dictates the mores, initiated though changes may be by individuals or minorities; the individuals or minorities, more often than not, are cut down for their trouble. And if a unit of the mass wants to feel superior, it will find a way. This terrible drive has found expression in many ways, through history—in slavery and genocide, xenophobia and snobbery, race prejudice and sex differentiation. Given a man who, among his fellows, has no real superiority, you are faced with a bedevilled madman who, if superiority is denied him, and he cannot learn one or earn one, will turn on something weaker than himself and make it inferior. The obvious, logical, handiest subject for this inexcusable indignity is his woman.
He could not do this to anyone he loved.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 41 (p. 126)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3 “Morality”, p. 146

“Mankind has in it a crushing need to feel superior. This doesn’t have to bother the very small minority who actually are superior, but it sure troubles the controlling majority who are not. If you can’t be really good at anything, then the only way to be able to prove you are superior is to make someone else inferior. It is this rampaging need in humanity which has, since pre-history, driven a man to stand on the neck of his neighbor, a nation to enslave another, a race to tread on a race. But it is also what men have done to women.
Did they actually find them inferior to begin with, and learn from that to try to feel superior to other things outside—other races, religions, nationalities, occupations?
Or was it the other way around: did men make women inferior for the same reason they tried to dominate the outsider? Which is cause, which effect?”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 36 (p. 115)
Venus Plus X (1960)

““Now how can you like a man without wanting him?” she demands of herself aloud.
There is no answer. It is an article of faith with her. If you like a man, it has to be because you want him. Whoever heard of it any other way?”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Source: Venus Plus X (1960), Section 32 (p. 101)

“An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 183

“There are only three ways of dealing with sex. It may be gratified; it may be repressed; or it may be sublimated. The latter is, through history, often an ideal and frequently a success, but it is always an instability.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 41 (p. 128)
Venus Plus X (1960)

Theodore Sturgeon Quotes

“We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 2 “Baby is Three”, p. 94
Context: That’s fairly common. We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe.

“The idiot heard the sounds, but they had no meaning for him.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 1 “The Fabulous Idiot”, p. 1
Context: The idiot heard the sounds, but they had no meaning for him. He lived inside somewhere, apart, and the little link between word and significance hung broken.

“Ask the next question.”

Theodore Sturgeon

His explanation of the meaning of a small symbol he used when writing his signature, as quoted in an interview with David Duncan (with an image of his signature) http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/duncan.html. <br class="br">Variant: Ask the next question. And the one after that. <br class="br">Context: It means &quot;Ask the next question.&quot; Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. It&#x27;s the symbol of everything humanity has ever created, and is the reason it has been created. This guy is sitting in a cave and he says, &quot;Why can&#x27;t man fly?&quot; Well, that&#x27;s the question. The answer may not help him, but the question now has been asked.<br>The next question is what? How? And so all through the ages, people have been trying to find out the answer to that question. We&#x27;ve found the answer, and we do fly. This is true of every accomplishment, whether it&#x27;s technology or literature, poetry, political systems or anything else. That is it. Ask the next question. And the one after that.

“There’s this about a farm: when the market’s good there’s money, and when it’s bad there’s food.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 1, p. 34

“It's the Simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Microcosmic God

Professor Thaddeus MacIlhainy Nudnick, in "Two Percent Inspiration", first published in Astounding Science-Fiction (October 1941); also published in Microcosmic God : Volume II : The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1995), edited by Paul Williams, p. 322 ISBN 1556433018

“The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and … and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 184

“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”

Theodore Sturgeon

As quoted in The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction (1964) by James Blish, p. 14

“Here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew — not an exterior force, nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 186

“You have questions—urgent questions—I know that. And what makes them urgent is that you have in your mind the answers you want to hear. You will be more and more angry if you do not get those answers, but some can’t be given as you would hear them, because they would not be true.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Source: Venus Plus X (1960), Section 13 (p. 40)

“Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 2, p. 97

“That Heel. That lousy wart on the nose of progress.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Microcosmic God

Character Hughie McCauley, quoting fictional space-opera hero Captain Jaundess, in "Two Percent Inspiration", first published in Astounding Science-Fiction (October 1941); also published in Microcosmic God : Volume II : The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1995), edited by Paul Williams, p. 322 ISBN 1556433018

“Is it men’s disgust of women that makes so many of them treat women with such contempt? Is it that which makes it so easy to point out that the Don Juans and the Lotharios, for all their hunger for women, are often merely trying to see how many women they can punish?”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 36 (p. 114)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“As Adam said when his wife fell out of the tree—Eve’s dropping again.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 24 (p. 71)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“Morals: They’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 175

“You cannot be objective about this because you have been indoctrinated, sermonized, drenched, imbued, inculcated and policed on the matter since first you wore blue booties. You come from a time and place in which the maleness of the male, and the femaleness of the female, and the importance of their difference, were matters of almost total preoccupation.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 41 (p. 123)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“So it is easily seen that the sexual insignes are nothing in themselves, for any of them, in another time and place, might belong to both sexes, the other sex, or neither. In other words, a skirt does not make the social entity, woman. It takes a skirt plus a social attitude to do it.
But all through history, in virtually every culture and country, there has indeed been a “woman’s province” and a “man’s province,” and in most cases the differences between them have been exploited to fantastic, sometimes sickening extremes.
Why?”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 41 (p. 125)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”

Theodore Sturgeon

Title of story about the incest taboo and social pathologies in the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967) by Harlan Ellison.

“God," he cries, dying on Mars, "God, we made it!”

Theodore Sturgeon

published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1959
The Man Who Lost The Sea

“And Charlie asked questions! His unease had long since disappeared, and two of his most deep-dyed characteristics took over: one, the result of his omnivorous, undisciplined, indefatigable reading and picking of brains; second, the great gaping holes this had left in his considerable body of knowledge. Both appeared far more drastic than he had heretofore known; he knew ever so much more than he knew he knew, and he had between five and seven times as much misinformation and ignorance than he had ever dreamed.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 19 (p. 59)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“Pleasure, the outer edge of ecstasy, was in the dour days of Protestantism, considered sinful in itself, wherever gained; Rome held specifically that any or all sexual pleasure was sinful. And for all this capped volcano produced in terms of bridges and houses, factories and bombs, it gouted from its riven sides a frightful harvest of neurosis. And even where a nation officially discarded the church, the same repressive techniques remained, the same preoccupation with doctrine, filtered through the same mesh of guilt. So sex and religion, the real meaning of human existence, ceased to be meaning and became means; the unbridgeable hostility between the final combatants was the proof of the identity of their aim—the total domination, for the ultimate satisfaction of the will to superiority, of all human minds.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Section 41 (p. 130)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“Love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 169

“You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one. ”

Theodore Sturgeon

“Faith is a beautiful thing. So are forest fires, and the color of gangrene. I think faith—especially capital-F Faith—is more dangerous and more disgusting than either. It is a substitute for thought.”

Theodore Sturgeon

How to Avoid a Hole in the Head in Marvel Science Stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Science_Stories (May 1951), p. 115

“It means "Ask the next question." Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. It's the symbol of everything humanity has ever created, and is the reason it has been created. This guy is sitting in a cave and he says, "Why can't man fly?"”

Theodore Sturgeon

Well, that&#x27;s the question. The answer may not help him, but the question now has been asked.<br>The next question is what? How? And so all through the ages, people have been trying to find out the answer to that question. We&#x27;ve found the answer, and we do fly. This is true of every accomplishment, whether it&#x27;s technology or literature, poetry, political systems or anything else. That is it. Ask the next question. And the one after that.<br><br>His explanation of the meaning of a small symbol he used when writing his signature, as quoted in an interview with David Duncan (with an image of his signature) http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/duncan.html, sometime around 1980.

“Now how can you like a man without wanting him?”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

she demands of herself aloud.
There is no answer. It is an article of faith with her. If you like a man, it has to be because you want him. Whoever heard of it any other way?
Section 32 (p. 101)
Venus Plus X (1960)

“Half of humanity doesn’t know what it wants or how to find out. The other half knows what it wants, hasn’t got it, and is going crazy trying to convince itself that it already has it.”

Theodore Sturgeon

Source: Short fiction, The Martian and the Moron (1949), p. 37

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