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.

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.

The secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels.

Lon frowned. “They’re so far ahead of us,” he said uneasily, “that they could conquer us if they wanted to. And that’s bad!”
“Lon!” said the older man severely. “They’re civilized! Civilized men don’t want to conquer other men!”

The unfamiliar is not necessarily unreasonable.

It is the custom of all men, everywhere, to be obtuse where women are concerned.

And, just as she had responded to primitive prowess, so Ron reacted to feminine admiration by an enormously increased urge to accomplish.

It isn't reasonable!" insisted Holmes. "It doesn't make sense!" "The question," observed Burke, "isn't whether it makes sense, but whether it's fact.

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

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

Hoddan fumbled for her meaning. It wasn’t quite an apology for trying to get him killed. But at least it was a disclaimer of future intentions in that direction.

“Do you realize,” he asked, “that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its Golden Age? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the Good Old Days?”
“I hadn’t thought of it in just those words, sir—”
“It is one of the most-avoided facts of life,” said the ambassador. “Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable.

I've never noticed that being nonsensical keeps things from happening. Don’t you ever read about politics?

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.

The hearts of the rich are hardened. The existence of the poor is a reproach to them.