Top 15 Murray Leinster Quotes

Facts are facts! And if they’re impossible, they’re still facts!

His reasoning was emotional, and therefore simple.

Desolate and dreary as the little town was in the world of today, it was infinitely more liveable than the same town of nearly two centuries before. There had been much progress in how to do things. It was regrettable that there was less progress in knowledge of things worth doing.

It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable.

“We’re fools!” said Harrison. “Morons! Idiots!”
“If you speak of my altruism,” said Pepe cheerfully, “I agree. But if you speak of your interest in a very pretty girl, then I point out that nobody is ever as happy as while he is making a fool of himself over a woman.

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

It was totally unrealistic to think that because there had been wildly unlikely coincidences in the immediate past, that there would be more wildly unlikely ones turning up in orderly succession. Yet...

It isn’t illegal to buy an artist’s work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!

There is never a rational reason for a man to rejoice that a certain pretty girl exists and that he has found her. The experience, however, is universal.

Most men develop convictions about the cosmos and such beliefs come in two varieties. One kind is a conviction that the cosmos does not make sense. That it exists by chance and changes by chance and human beings do not matter. This view produces a fine complacency. The other kind is a belief that the cosmos does make sense, and was designed with the idea that people were going to live in it, and that what they do and what happens to them is important. This theory seems to be depressing.

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

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.

As a young man he was considered promising. If he had been interested in such matters, he might have had a moderately successful career in politics, as politics was practiced in his nation. But he liked things. Real things.

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.

Eminent men were called on to take command and arrange suitable measures. They immediately acted as eminent men so often do; they took action to retain their eminence. Their first instinct was caution. When a man is important enough, it does not matter if he never does anything. It is only required of him that he do nothing wrong. Eminent figures all over the world prepared to do nothing wrong. They were not so concerned to do anything right.