Top 15 Algis Budrys Quotes

Engineers do not particularly like PR men.

I had had a good life. A somewhat shorter one than I had anticipated, but I had had the money, I had had the girls, and nobody told me what to do. Is there, really, anything else? Are you sure?

Nobody liked him. Nobody loved him—and this bothered him. But everyone kowtowed to him, and that, it seems, was what he held most precious.

I understood, even then, that without question the best way to understand these people was to understand their infatuation with cars.

Cars seemed to me to speak more clearly of Earth than any single thing else.

Well, you know, you do that kind of thing when you’re young. Then you get older. I think maybe most of the elders know all about that. They see but they don’t say, because they know everybody gets older.

It’s amazing how self-perpetuating ignorance is.

Any intelligent race you can hope to someday relate to is going to have to come up essentially the same developmental roads and deal with the physical laws of the Universe in about the same way.

I—ah—have some idea."
"You argue?"
"I propose."
"Marriage?"
"No. Another form of dialectical antagonism.

I hate acting on probability."
"You go to your church and I'll go to mine.

Bribes," Michaelmas said. "They always go to bribes when they're not sure they're on top, and coercion when they are. That's all they know. They really don't believe anyone would help them just on their own merits.

The horse is a stubborn, dirty, stupid animal that reminds me of a sheep. Its only use is to embody the wings a man feels within him, and to do this it lathers and sweats, defecates and steps in badger holes.

I don’t know...but then, if God had intended Man to think, He would have given him brains, I suppose.

Even so, we're the only animal whose signals can't be trusted by its own kind." He smiled. "Except for thee and me, of course.

The way the world worked, once the word was out, the effect would take on exhaustibility. There was always not merely the event itself, but opinion of the event, and rebuttal of the opinion, and the ready charge of self-interest, and the countercharge. There was the analysis of the event, and the excavation of the root causes of the event, and the placement of the event in the correct historical context. Everyone would want to kick the can, and it would clatter over the cobblestones interminably, far from the toes of those who’d first impelled it.