George R. Stewart Quotes

He had kept the university library as a reserve for the future. He had even taught the children to respect it. Yes, he had even, he was afraid, put a kind of taboo upon it. In fact, not only here but everywhere, he had always tried to impress the children with an almost mystical value of books. Still he kept the symbol of the burning of the books as one of the worst things that men could do.

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

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

Firearms were as likely to create as to solve difficulties.

But, granting the numbers, the family group was just what it might have been at any time in almost any society—father, mother, and children, tightly grouped to form the basic social unit, so basic in fact that it might be considered biological rather than social. After all, he thought, the family was the toughest of all human institutions. It had preceded civilization, and so it naturally survived afterward.

What a strange thing then is this great civilization, that no sooner have men attained it than they seek to flee from it!

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?

“There are no atheists in foxholes,” he remembered, but the whole world now was nothing but a huge foxhole! But certainly what had happened did not inspire one to think that God was particularly interested in the human race, or in its individuals.

Men go and come, but earth abides.

People certainly tended to overestimate the intelligence of dogs!