Edgar Pangborn Quotes

In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl.

You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it.

I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers—who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem?

In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it.

After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior.

The ocean, forever changing and the same, was awake with deep music tonight; I was alone and not alone at all. Not alone, looking down some hours from the moving bow, seeing the flash and lingering subsidence of the noctilucae, those living diamonds of the sea, their light as transient as the sea foam and eternal as life, if life is eternal. Everything goes with me, the cherished faces, the words that endure although no embodied voice is near my body but only the great continuing voice of the sea and of a westerly wind out of the open regions of the world. I am not alone.

One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.

Faith," she said gently. "But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.

A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves.

Their door closed; presently she cried out in that desired pain that is brief release from trouble.

One doesn’t look for the small promises of an ethical revolution in the headlines: the ocean’s currents do not derive from the ocean’s tempests.

I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches.

The three billion crawl about, all over the helpless earth, destroying and defiling, killing the forests, polluting the air with smoke and radioactive dust and the torturing noises of the machine. In place of meadows, filling stations. The lakes are puddles of human filth. Two years ago the whole area of San Francisco Harbor was covered with dead fish: even the ocean is sick from the human taint, and this they call progress.

I wonder," said Abraham, "if I'd ever think I knew enough to act.
"If you don't, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say."

A crisis passed usually means another one approached.