“When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!”
In Star Science Fiction 5, edited by Frederik Pohl, p. 53
Short fiction, Company Store (1959)
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Robert Silverberg 88
American speculative fiction writer and editor 1935Related quotes
1970s, The Education of Mike McManus, TVOntario, December 28 1977
“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”
Source: The Wealth of Nations
Variant: When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.
Source: Parnassus on Wheels
The Chimneys of India Song, from Practicalities (1987, trans. 1990).
Speech in Aldridge (2 October 1964), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid. The Thinking of Enoch Powell (B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1965), p. 64
1960s
“I told him that his profit is made when you buy, not when you sell.”
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!
Attributed to Marx (possibly in jest) in W. C. Privy's Original Bathroom Companion (2003).
Misattributed
“There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire – poison and antidote.”
In Kenneth Harris Talking To: Bertrand Russell (1971)
Attributed from posthumous publications