Murray Leinster Quotes

There are some people so stupid you have to show them everything. I didn’t realize that there are people so stupid you can’t show them anything.

They raise the question of whether I’ve been crazy, and am suddenly sane, or whether I’ve been sane up to now, and have suddenly gone crazy.

I've got an impossible job on my hands," he told them, "and if I succeed at it, there's an inconceivable one to follow.

For once, no eminent figure assumed the undignified pose involved in standing on one’s dignity.

Hoddan felt the anger any man feels when he sees betrayal of that honor a competent machine represents.

He’d caused the First Native War on Mars, by taking advantage of the fact that at that time human law had not defined the killing of Martians as murder.

His reasoning was emotional, and therefore simple.

He was in a state of doubt which passed very well for modesty.

There was bitter resistance to the idea. It was demanded that Burke justify his views in a more reasonable way than by mere demonstration that they worked.

My purpose is not to make profits, but to keep people from being killed. Quaint, eh? But I’m one of the people I don’t want killed.

Lane understood. Burke was one of that considerable part of humanity which enthusiastically believes in anything that’s sufficiently dramatic.

Again time passed. In one of the remoter galaxies a supernova flamed, and on a rocky, barren world a small living thing squirmed experimentally—and to mankind the one event was just as important as the other.

He’d gone to Walden in the hope of achievement. There, of course, he failed because in a free economy industrialists consider that freedom is the privilege to be stupid without penalty. In other than free economies, of course, stupidity is held to be the duty of administrators. But Hoddan now believed himself in the fascinating situation of having knowledge and abilities which were needed by people who knew their need.

A practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a noble sacrifice of personal inclinations to the welfare of the community.

There was a beautiful row. You’ve really scared people, Hoddan! You deserve well of the republic! Every government and every person needs to be thoroughly terrified occasionally. It limbers up the brain.