L. Sprague de Camp Quotes

I find that verse provides one of the cheapest and most harmless of life’s major pleasures.

Before sending my opinions forth across the chasm of surmise, I prefer to wait until they’re provided with a more solid bridge of fact.

Certainly their intentions are peaceful, like those of the lion for the lamb. The lion wishes only to be allowed to devour the lamb in peace.

It was hardly fair to his opponents, but I have never had much sympathy for the victims of gambling sharks. If they were not trying to get something for nothing, they would not expose themselves to being taken.

The world is full of people who, if they got to Heaven, would complain about the tune of the harps and the dampness of the clouds.

There was no harder-boiled materialist than I; I rejected Marxism as too mystical and not materialistic enough.

But what argument could I offer? It was nothing but an irrational feeling—the kind of “premonition” we get from time to time but remember only on the rare occasions when it is fulfilled by the event. I had no evidence.

I passed that off as women’s intuition, which is wrong more often than not. People remember the times it works and forget those it fails.

We rented an apartment in a rambly wooden-frame building, a block from the beach. This was before the waterfront sprouted a host of huge condominiums, like a plague of concrete mushrooms.

His voice had a hypnotic quality, which lulled one into a kind of passive daze. One ended with the impression that one had had a wonderful revelation but without remembering much of what the Master had actually said. Some of his assertions seem to contradict what others had told me of his doctrines; but I understood that he brought out a new doctrine every month or two, keeping his suckers too confused to think.

As you know, Monsieur Newbury, the civilization is but a thin crust over our savage interiors, no matter if our skins be white or black. We must try to keep this shell of egg intact.

I once read that the Devil studied Basque for seven years and only learned two words.

I fear me that the eighteenth century, which I have idealized all these years, never really existed. The real one was far dirtier, more narrow-minded, brutal, orthodox, and superstitious than I could have ever conceived without seeing it.

For thousands of years, priests and philosophers have told us to love mankind without giving any sound reason for loving the creatures. The mass of them are a lot of cruel, treacherous, hairless apes. They hate us intellectuals, longhairs, highbrows, eggheads, or double-domes, despite—or perhaps because—without us they would still be running naked in the wilderness and turning over flat stones for their meals. Love them? Hah!