Robert Sheckley Quotes

In a way it made no difference, since nothing is permanent except our illusions.

Last week we revoked his Godhead; we caught him operating a life without a license.

All men are mortal, he tells us, but some are more mortal than others.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and I don’t like it much either.

I feel no moral compunction in the slightest at my so-called crime. If a man cannot retain control of his own body, then he deserves to lose it. I have observed, during a long and varied lifetime, that men will give their bodies to any rogue who asks, and will enslave their minds to the first voice that commands them to obey. This is why the vast majority of men cannot keep even their natural birthright of a mind and body, but choose instead to rid themselves of those embarrassing emblems of freedom." "That," Detective Urdorf said, "is the classic apologia of the criminal." "That which you call a crime when one man does it," Kraggash said, "you call government when many men do it. Personally, I fail to see the distinction; and failing to see it, I refuse to live by it.

Our roles are chose for us in this world by the stern dictates of an unrelenting Fate; and many a man who thought to play the emperor on Life’s stage found himself cast for a corpse instead.

Thus action serves as anodyne, whereas contemplation is revealed as the most direct form of involvement, and therefore much shunned by men.

Time devours our feeble mortality, leaving us with but the sour residue of memory.

And a great longing overcame him, a desire to be finished with desire, to forego pleasure and pain, to quit the petty modes of achievement and failure, to have done with distractions, and get on with the business of life, which was death.

“The acceptance of indeterminacy is the beginning of wisdom,” the hermit quoted.

All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth or falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics.

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

Quite in vain did several lawyers point out to him that, if justice really existed, there would be no need for law and lawmakers, and thus one of mankind’s noblest conceptions would be obliterated, and an entire occupational group would be thrown out of work. For it is the essence of the law, they told him, that abuses and outrages should exist, since these discrepancies served as proof and validation of the necessity of law, and of justice itself.

Marvin did not give way to despair. He gave way instead to anger, which was a much healthier emotion, though equally unproductive.

You have been bitten by the travel bug, which is very suitable for your time of life, and is a passion akin to falling in love, or fighting an idealistic war, or becoming disillusioned with the world, and other postures of the young.