Keith Laumer Quotes

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."

Are you sure you’re really the Devil and not someone else with the same name?

The Third Era had recognized the impossibility of correcting the effects of human interference with more human interference.

It was a nasty little village, poverty-stricken, ugly, hostile, much like little towns in all times and climes.

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

I took all these details in as the mighty carnivore looked me over, yawned, and paced majestically toward me, frowning across at the distant herds like a troubled politician wondering who to pay the bribe to.

One nice thing about working with a piece of machinery: you don’t waste time trying to justify your actions.

M-magic? Lafayette stuttered.
"Nonsense. Electronics."

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.

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

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.

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)

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

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.'

Yours is not to reason why, eh? I guess you’re lucky at that. It’s not dying that hurts—it’s living.