Robert Silverberg Quotes

To opt for being a tourist is to choose the easiest but most contemptible path; ultimately it’s the most dangerous one, too, in a certain sense. You have to accept the built-in epithets that go with the part: they will think of you as a foolish tourist, an ignorant tourist, a vulgar tourist, a mere tourist. Do you want to be considered mere? Around you able to accept that? Is that really your preferred self-image—baffled, bewildered, led about by the nose? You'll sign up for packaged tours, you'll carry guidebooks and cameras, you'll go to the cathedral and the museums and the marketplace, and you'll remain always on the outside of things, seeing a great deal, experiencing nothing. What a waste! You will be diminished by the very traveling that you thought would expand you. Tourism hollows and parches you. All places become one: a hotel, a smiling, swarthy, sunglassed guide, a bus, a plaza, a fountain, a marketplace, a museum, a cathedral. You are transformed into a feeble shriveled thing made out of glued-together travel folders; you are naked but for your visas; the sum of your life’s adventures is a box of leftover small change from many indistinguishable lands.

“Do I chatter?”
“Should I be honest or should I be tactful?”

Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject.

Nothing was his business, these days. When a man had no business, he had to appoint himself to some. So he was here to do research, ostensibly, which is to say to snoop and spy.

The King is an absolute monarch, and I mean absolute. Whatever he says, goes. There’s no council of nobles, no senate, nothing that remotely challenges the King’s authority. He’s got courtiers and bureaucrats, sure, but the whole empire is essentially his own private property, to rule as he pleases.
It sounds like a recipe for disaster. Certainly such an arrangement always has been, in historical times. No empire can hope to have an unbroken string of capable rulers. This king or that one might be all right, and maybe as much as a century can go along without any troublemakers reaching the throne. But sooner or later some madman is bound to come along, a Nero or a Caligula or a Hitler, somebody who won’t be able to handle absolute power, who runs amok and causes terrible chaos.

My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles.

The style in which it was written told me much: I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice.

I enjoyed the late 1960s as much as anyone, and I regarded much of the political ferment of the time as vital to the survival of our society—the Vietnam war might have gone on for many decades more without it. But the era did have its silly side, and the search for the immediately relevant at the expense of the less immediately practical side was, to me, one of the sillier aspects of it. Throwing most of past human knowledge overboard for the sake of bringing about instant social reform did not strike me as an effective way of achieving anything but ignorance. Evidently it seemed that way to others, too: after a while the traditional sciences and historical subjects returned to the curriculum, Shakespeare and Sophocles were allowed back in also, and not a great deal was heard from the earnest, deadly young decreers of non-negotiable demands who had had such power over academic life for a time. (Although a lot of them grew up and became university professors, and they are behind the modern craze for political correctness that has spread so much terror through our academic institutions.)

Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you.

The Barjazid does not yet rule as an absolute tyrant, for that might turn the people against him, and he is still insecure in his power—while you live. But he rules for himself and for his family, not for Majipoor. He lacks a sense of right, and does only what seems useful and expedient. As his confidence grows, so too will his crimes, until Majipoor groans under the whip of a monster.

All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context.

Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.

But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank.

Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.”

I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?