David Gerrold Quotes

The second time is by mutual consent.

Whatever our purpose, we probably aren't fulfilling it. We're not functioning as we should.
He shrugged at her. "How should we function?"
"Like human beings." She said it righteously.
"Isn't that what the human race is already doing? Functioning like human beings—squabbling with each other, killing each other, hating...?"
"That's not human."
"Oh, but it is. It's very human."
"Well, it's not what human should be."
"Now that's a different story. You're not talking about what people are, but what you want them to be."
"Well, maybe we should be what we aren't because what we are now isn't good enough. Maybe we should be dismantled."
"I don't think we have to worry too much about somebody up there doing it—we're doing it ourselves."

“You could call it that,” Auberson sighed. It wouldn’t be correct, but you could call it that.

You aren’t really jumping through time, that’s the illusion; what you’re actually doing is leaving one timestream and jumping to—maybe even creating—another. The second one is identical to the one you just left, including all of the changes you made in it—up to the instant of your appearance. At that moment, simply by the fact of your existence in it, the second timestream becomes a different timestream. You are the difference.

Hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy. Not only did I try to influence the course of their actions—but I dared to do it in the name of God—I tried to save their souls! I tried to save them from themselves!
Is that so horrible?
Ah, yes. It is the worst of all possible crimes.

Life must be a daring adventure or it is nothing at all. It's always a choice between joy and despair. I tried despair. Joy is more fun.

There are only two times when it's appropriate for a man to have his nose in a woman's vagina. The first time is when he's stark naked and weighs about 7 lbs.

So what happens when the camera is finally invented?
Handley let his breath escape in a whoosh. "The artists are out of jobs?"
"Wrong. The artist simply have to learn how to do things that the camera can't. The artist had to stop being a recorder and start being an interpreter. That's when expressionism was born."

Now you see why I hate to leave my lab. It tires me out too much to have to do other people’s thinking for them.

It was as private as the main floor of Hell.

There isn’t a tool built that can’t be used as a weapon.

Ah well—the boss didn’t have to know how to run the business. He only needed to know how to run the people who knew.

I’ve always suspected that Judas was the most faithful of the apostles, and that his betrayal of Jesus was not a betrayal at all, simply a test to prove that Christ could not be betrayed. The way I see it, Judas hoped and expected that Christ would have worked some kind of miracle and turned away those soldiers when they came for him. Or perhaps he would not die on the cross. Or perhaps—well, never mind. In any case, Jesus didn’t do any of these things, probably because he was not capable of it. You see, I’ve also always believed that Christ was not the son of God, but just a very very good man, and that he had no supernatural powers at all, just the abilities of any normal human being. When he died, that’s when Judas realized that he had not been testing God at all—he’d been betraying a human being, perhaps the best human being. Judas’s mistake was in wanting too much to believe in the powers of Christ. He wanted Christ to demonstrate to everyone that he was the son of God, and he believed his Christ could do it—only his Christ wasn’t the son of God and couldn’t do it, and he died. You see, it was Christ who betrayed Judas—by promising what he couldn’t deliver. And Judas realized what he had done and hung himself. That’s my interpretation of it, Auberson—not the traditional, I’ll agree, but it has more meaning to me. Judas’s mistake was in believing too hard and not questioning first what he thought were facts. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake.

I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.

Not that he was jealous of the machine—but it was reassuring to know that there was still something that human beings could do that machines could not master.
Love.