Jack Williamson Quotes

He certainly didn’t feel insane, he reflected—but then did any lunatic, ever?

Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to assume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion.

Horn sat in the near darkness staring at eight floating choices and reflected how inevitability had channeled his actions since he had left the Cluster. Since he had accepted the money from the voice in the darkness, there had been only one step to take, and he had taken it; one path to follow, and he had followed it. Beyond, it had seemed, there would be choice; never now.
So it had let him on, step by step, comforted by the self-nurtured illusion of free will, guided subtly, unyieldingly, by the iron tube of determinism. Once it started, he never had a chance to turn back.

The criticism of SF has tapped rich new vines for researchers, and I can think of writers who seem to be trying harder to impress the critics than to please their readers. I’m afraid the critical tail has begun to wag the creative dog.

“I don’t see the necessity of this mummery—”
“Necessity?” Wu said. “Free will is a necessity. And the illusion is more important than the reality.”

“There are the troops and their commanders, the technicians, the laborers, and many other classes. All of them have different desires and different ideas about how to gain them. Multiply this by the number of worlds in the Empire and you have a conflict of interests which can never be reconciled.”
“But isn’t that inefficient?” Wendre asked.
“It is indeed. But inefficiency is one of the penalties of freedom. You can’t be efficient unless you can force people into channels and make them go where they don’t want to go.”

The mystery of it gets me. The builders of the trilithons and the road were high-tech wizards, but their skills didn’t save them. I’ve been wondering how they died. Maybe they got too good at the science of war.

Conquerors live by conquest; the first failure is a signal for the conquered to rise against them.

Creation.…
It is its own nemesis. Success is temporary, and idolization will not make the ephemeral permanent. Decay is implicit in the birth of any organism.
An empire is an organism.

Power is habit-forming. We grew addicted to it. Few things survive the centuries’ slow decay: senses grow dull; passions grow weak; and ideals die. Only the taste for power lives on as an excuse for survival.

Human knowledge is never entirely consistent or complete, because the human brain is only a crude and transient mass of watery cells, error-prone and glacier-slow.

The difficulties were great, the odds were greater, but Horn would conquer them. And, having conquered them, be left unsatisfied.
Life holds no kindness for such a man. Any defeat short of death is only a spur; success is empty.
With cold self-analysis, Horn recognized this fact, accepted it, and went on unchanged.

SF still appeals to the young, as always, because so much of it is set in the futures in which they will be living.

“Whatever a woman is,” Wendre said, “she’s that second and a woman first.”

“I go where I wish,” Horn had said, there at the base of the cliff.
And the ancient Mr. Wu had replied, “So we think, so we think. In the middle of things we see no pattern. But as we look back and view the picture whole, we realize how men are moved about by forces they do not suspect. The pieces fall into place. The pattern is clear.”
In other words, when somebody moves, something has pushed.
Choice. Where had there been choice?