Robert Silverberg Quotes

Am I loyal, or am I loyal? But I don’t like the way things are going. It’s a citizen’s right to worry about the state of the realm, isn’t it? If matters are not to our liking, we should speak up. That’s our tradition, isn’t it? If we allow small abuses now, who knows what sort of things he’ll be doing five years on!

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?

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality.

So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.

No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.

“This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.”
“So?”
“What do I need it for?”
“Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.”

Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.

In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art?

The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die.

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.

Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all.

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