Robert Sheckley Quotes

A tremor ran through him. He had chosen, he reminded himself. He alone was responsible. The psychological test had proved that.
And yet, how responsible were the psychologists who had given him the test? How responsible was Mike Terry for offering a poor man so much money? Society had woven the noose and put it around his neck, and he was hanging himself with it, and calling it free will.

It might have meant something, or it might not have. That was the thing about uncertainty, you were never sure.

The deed of dying transcends class and breeding. It is every man’s patent of nobility, his summons from the king, his knightly adventure, the greatest deed of his life. And how he acquits himself in that lonely and perilous enterprise is his true measure as a man.

Strange," he said in a conversational voice, "how, for some men, the possession of a gun acts as a powerful intoxicant. It destroys the reasoning faculties, eh, Carlo?

We of the Hunt are part of the solution. We offer voluntary murder as a substitute for war. You know that mankind will never be satisfied unless it is killing something. People can’t even properly enjoy a landscape unless there’s something moving across it that can be shot at.

It is the principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a housebuilding business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called 'religion,' and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I'm sure you've heard it all before. But I'll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse." "What's that?" Carmody asked. "It's the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, 'Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.' The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him." "I think I see what you mean," Carmody said. "I've made it too complicated," Maudsley said. "There's a much simpler reason for avoiding religion." "What's that?" "Just consider its style—bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans—fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can't believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?

She was an extremely attractive woman if you like the type, which could best be described as homicidal schizophrenic paranoiac with kittenish overtones.

But the description is not the described, as Amirra Tauba remarked as he chewed up the map of the galaxy!

It was one hell of an inspection when you went around finding how many sane men you had left.

For love, as he knew it, was an aberration, a form of temporary insanity, a short-lived state of autosuggestion.

“What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on a planet that is all mountains?”
“Stupid ones!” Casker said.

This is a shopping mall," the Professor said. "At one time it was the central artifact of American life. It was to the Americans what the atrium was to the Romans or the plaza to the Spaniards, the great place of assemblage where one comes and ritually buys food and tries to arrange romantic assignations with attractive members of the preferred sex, whichever that might be.

Love is always a risk; but hate is a deadly peril.

“You might say that,” Flynn said, thus avoiding an outright lie, since anyone might say anything whether it was true or not.

He shook his head violently, pulled himself together and swallowed a stiff dose of Infradex, a drug designed to alleviate drug reactions. Within seconds he was his old, normally depressed self. This cheered him considerably, and he left the hut in a mood teetering on the edge of equanimity.