Robert Sheckley Quotes

Few individuals of any race murder for pleasure. There are perfectly adequate reasons to kill, though, reasons which might satisfy any philosopher.
But, once accepted, there are more reasons, and more and more. And murder, once accepted, is hard to stop. It leads irresistibly to war and, from there, to annihilation.

Ifs and buts could erode the soundest of principles.

All very unreasonable, but Arthur Gammet was beginning to suspect that most wizards were unreasonable people.

Now look," Janice said. "If the king is so rich, why can't he pay?"
"The king never pays for anything he can get free," the ferra said. "That's why he's so rich.

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

Paradox is the inevitable forerunner of chaos.

This planet’s secret menace was—freedom!

I’ve heard that some of the larger spiders hunt songbirds. I have no objection to that. The spiders belong here, too. Let nature do what it needs to do. We who are people know more than to guide ourselves by nature’s practices.

When the people have to leave a place, their dreams leave first.

The last cigarette is a sort of souvenir and something to remember Earth by. It's the perfect symbol of men's greatest invention."
"And what would that be?"
"Something desirable that's not good for you.

I know you’re sane and you know you’re sane. But what if we’re both wrong?

It is not very logical to look over the attributes you possess and then declare that they are the most important attributes in the universe.

In this talk I have tried to present some of my own reality, as far as I am able, at one particular time in my life. These are the things that make up my momentary universe. No summary is possible, even though I am at the end of my time here. Everything must remain unresolved, just as it in fact is. My subject matter escapes the confines of my definitions, for there is no datum that is not somehow pertinent to my situation. It is all part of the vast and uncompleted jigsaw puzzle that is our lives.

As a matter of fact, I am amazed at what has happened to science fiction in recent years. It has become a heavy academic field. And science fiction writers are being accorded a respect now, which I, as one of their peers and well-wishers, can only view with alarm and suspicion.
It seems like only yesterday, though it was in fact some 20 years ago, that all of us were writing pulp-action stories about a nebulous and ill-defined region that we called the future. Now our yarns are analysed in university classrooms for virtues we never suspected that they had. This is particularly true in America, the country that coined the word ‘overkill’ and then demonstrated its practical applications.

Esotericism, which is legal, but not too much fun, prescribes to our condition. But when one tries to follow a spiritual path, nothing much happens for most of us. Faced with this lack of results, the esoteric schools put the blame squarely on us rather than on any insufficiency in their doctrines or methods. Finally, they explain our failure by taking refuge in paradoxes. They tell us, for example, that we can attain only by not wanting to attain—a neat double bind.
Some esoteric schools caution the disciple not to practise the extraordinary powers which we will acquire in the course of our work. This is surely an extraordinary statement. Most of us can’t muster the power to give up smoking, much less to levitate.