Robert Silverberg Quotes

What value is lineage to a drowning man?

Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

Only a man who doubts his own bravery bristles when called a coward.

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.

But, though he trusted his intuitive judgments, he rarely acted on them until he had had time to make a more rational reconnaissance.

Why conjure up galactic spaceships when meteors were so common?

He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer.

“The fascination of what’s difficult,” said Chalk. “It spins the world on its bearings.”

How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!

“But why?” he asked Deliamber.
The Vroon replied, “Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress.”

“You speak very generally,” Valentine said.
“I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly.

When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!

They were apt to be disappointed with the way he fulfilled his promises to them, for he intended, if he could, to sweep both the bickering rivals from power. But he did not ask pure and total saintliness of himself in his dealings with those whose chief role in the government appeared to be to impede and obstruct.

He named the names of gods. He named the names of kings—the secret names, the names they had worn as princes, before they became the newest Harinamur. He called upon all the forces of the universe to free himself from—
Me.

Dinoli had to clawed himself to first rank in public relations by sheer exertion, coupled with judicious backstabbing.