Keith Laumer Quotes

Less than total control is no control at all. You will obey my instructions, Mr. Ravel. In every detail. Or I will scrap the project.

Just what is your position here?
"I'm an adviser to his Majesty." Nicodaeus smiled blandly. "He thinks I'm a master of magic, of course, but among these feather-heads a little common sense is sufficient to earn one a reputation as a wise man."

The last burst picked me up and threw me a thousand miles into an open grave and the mud showered down on me and a giant tombstone fell out of the sky to mark the place, but I didn’t care any more, because I was far away, in that place where the heroes and the cowards lie together with a fine impartiality, waiting for eternity to pass, slowly, like a procession of snails creeping across an endless desert toward a distant line of mountains. (p. 18)

I know it’s hard to grasp at first. I seem to recall I was a bit difficult to convince once. We are accustomed to thinking we know everything. There’s a powerful tendency to just disbelieve anything that doesn’t fit the preconception.

Magic, after all? He felt the untrimmed hair at the nape of his neck rising. But then, maybe it was just electronics—magic rationalized.

It's a failing of your culture, Foster said, that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You're too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all 'established facts.'

Him and his pet dragon—
"More folklore, I take it?"
"Well, I never actually seen this dragon."
"Hmmm. Funny how nobody I've met has seen it, but they all believe in it."

To be adult is to be disillusioned. Only realities count.

Too late, I realized how I had trapped myself. I had let sleep in as a guest, and death had slipped through the door.

It was easy to see the mechanics of schizophrenia at work here. From wishing, it was an easy jump to believe.

Adventure has been defined as somebody else having a difficult time, a long way away. (p. 17)

Lucifer hurried on. “But I assure you that most of what you’ve heard is grossly exaggerated. That is to say, I’m not really as bad as all that. I mean, there are different kinds of er, badness. There is the real evil, and then there’s sin. I’m, ah, associated with sin.”
“The distinction seems a subtle one, Mr., ah, Lucifer—”
“Not really, professor. We all sense instinctively what true evil is. Sin is merely statutory evil—things that are regarded as wrong simply because there’s a rule against them. Like, ah, smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor and going to movies on Sunday, or wearing lipstick and silk hose, or eating pork, or swatting flies—depending on which set of rules you’re going by. They’re corollary to ritual virtues such as lighting candles or spinning prayer wheels or wearing out-of-date styles.”
Dimpleby leaned back and steepled his fingers. “Hmmm. Whereas genuine evil…?”
“Murder, violence, lying, cheating, theft,” Lucifer enumerated. “Sin, on the other hand, essentially includes anything that looks like it might be fun.”
“Come to think of it, I’ve never heard anything in praise of fun from the anti-sin people,” Curl said thoughtfully.
“Nor from any ecclesiastic with a good head for fund-raising,” Dimpleby concluded.
“It’s all due to human laziness, I’m afraid,” Lucifer said sadly. “It seems so much easier and more convenient to observe a few ritual prohibitions than to actually give up normal business practices.”

“Why do you fight this war?”
The alien mind howled out its war slogan—as incomprehensible as an astrologer’s jargon.

I know; you don’t consider it impossible. That’s the trouble with you; you don’t consider anything impossible. It would make life a lot easier for me if you’d let me rule out a few items—like leprechauns who hang out at Stonehenge.

I say, old man, you're developing something of a persecution complex, I'm afraid—
"That's easy, when you're persecuted."