David Gerrold Quotes

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.

Every human being is unique. We can generalize at length, but every human being is an individual. And this is especially true about children -- every child develops in their own unique way.

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."

Don’t push the on-button if you don’t know where the off-button is.

I wish I could change it all. I wish I could.
But I can’t.
Dammit.
Now I know what it’s like to have an indelible past—one that can’t be erased and changed at will. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening. And it makes me wish I had been more careful and thoughtful.

Death comes black and hard, rushing down on me from the future, with no possible chance of escape.

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

The second time is by mutual consent.

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.

Love isn't what you get. It's what you create.

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.

They say that killing is a mortal sin, that it is against the laws of God. If that is true—and I know now that it must be—if that is true, then every man who has ever taken a human life has been, from that moment on, damned for eternity. No matter how many men or nations say that it is all right for a man to take up arms against an enemy, it does not change that one basic fact—killing is a mortal sin.
And every one of those simple white markers we had stood among represents a soul condemned.
A nation had sentenced her sons to damnation so that she might survive.
There’s no such thing as a “moral war.”

Auberson’s first impression of the man was of eight pounds of potatoes in a ten-pound sack.

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.