Jack Williamson Quotes

He was a strong man in wise enough to realize that beyond power itself is the power of using it wisely.

Quietly she said: “I know I’m not insane.”
So, Barbee understood, did all lunatics.

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

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.

You have a right to be curious. And I have a right to refuse to satisfy it. You may credit it to your own charm or an old man’s whim, if you like. You are interesting, you know. Hired killers always are. Not admirable, but interesting.

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.

“That’s a cynical viewpoint,” Horn said slowly.
“I’m an old man. I can afford no longer the luxury of ideals. If I am to achieve results recognizable within my few remaining years, I must be practical.”

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

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

Accelerating change has become almost the first fact of life.

Two weeks passed, by the time of the ship—physiological time, that measured by heartbeats and all bodily rhythms, in which the span of life moved relentlessly toward its end, regardless of motion backward or forward along the time dimension.

“I’m not a religious man, Mr. Barbee—I reject the supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell.”
The dark man smiled.
“For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It’s my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem.”

“I wonder—?” whispered April Bell, her long eyes narrowed and dark. “I wonder what they really found?”
“Whatever it is,” breathed Barbee, “the find doesn’t seem to have made them very happy. A fundamentalist might think they had stumbled into hell.”
“No,” the girl said, “men aren’t that much afraid of hell.”

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.

And introvert is one of the harmless scientific terms he used to use when he was really writing about witches.