George R. Stewart Quotes

Yes, he realized, if a man began to think of himself as divinely appointed, he was close to thinking of himself as God—and at that point lay insanity.

A dead cat, it seemed, lay on the counter, but as he looked, it stirred to life and he realized that it had merely been lying, after the the habit of cats, in such a position that it looked dead. The cat looked at him with a kind of cold effrontery, as the duchess at the chambermaid. Ish felt uncomfortable, and had to remind himself that this was the way cats had always behaved.

Men go and come, but earth abides.

What you were preparing against—that never happened! All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid.

How then, once overthrown, shall this great civilization, except by renewed Forces and Pressures, ever come again?

In the times of civilization men had really felt themselves as the masters of creation. Everything has been good or bad in relation to man. So you killed rattlesnakes. But now nature had become so overwhelming that any attempt at its control was merely outside anyone’s circle of thought. You lived as part of it, not as its dominating power.

It has never happened!" cannot be construed to mean, "It can never happen!"—as well say, "Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable," or "Because I've never died, I am immortal.

Firearms were as likely to create as to solve difficulties.

In any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under.

People certainly tended to overestimate the intelligence of dogs!

If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back!

What would be the use of all these books now? Why worry about one of them? Why worry about all the millions of them? There was no one left, now, to carry on. Books themselves, mere wood pulp and lampblack, were nothing—without a mind to use them.

It was all tied up in that same old question. How much did man strike outward to affect all his surroundings and how much did the surroundings press in upon him? Did the Napoleonic Age produce Napoleon or did he produce it?

Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization.

The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later.