Walter Tevis Quotes

“We must remember that the United States, regardless of what the uninformed may say, is not a second-rate power. We must remember that freedom will conquer, we must…”
Suddenly Newton realized that the man speaking was the President of the United States, and he was speaking the bombast of the hopeless.

Weren’t there naive arts and sophisticated arts? And corrupt arts as well? And might that not be true of the sciences too? Could chemistry be more corrupt than botany? But that wasn’t so. It was the uses, the ends…

I have read over a hundred books. And I have played, over and over, recordings of the symphonies of Mozart and Brahms and Prokofiev and Beethoven, and chamber music, and operettas, and various musical works by Bach and Sibelius and Dolly Parton and Palestrina and Lennon. This music sometimes, even more than the books, enlarges my sense of the past.

It always horrified Bryce to see professors fawn on businessmen—the very men they ridiculed in their private conversations—whenever a research contract might be in the offing.

“We won’t necessarily become extinct. Disarmament is being negotiated. Not all of us are insane.”
“But most of you are. Enough of you are—it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.

It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fire—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.

Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a “great man.” I am not certain I like the idea of “great men”; it makes me uncomfortable. “Great men” often have had very bloody plans for mankind.

I must get inside that library! I must have books again. If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living.

He carried his bag and was accompanied by a nurse with a deliberately impassive face—the sort of face that seemed to say, “I don’t care what you die of, I intend to be efficient about my part of it.”

The woman stared at me. “You don’t know a church of the living God when you see one?”
I looked around me, at the aisles covered with plastic-sealed merchandise, at the racks of colored clothing and electronic equipment and rifles and golf clubs and jackets. “But this is no church,” I said. “This is a store.”

Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics, but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said; I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.
Why can no one read? What happened?

What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?

"Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers."
For a moment Bryce did not speak. Then he said, "But it was human beings who painted the pictures, made the statues."
"Only a few human beings," Newton said. "Only a few."

Biff is really stupid in most ways. It’s just that she’s very real—is very much a cat—and that makes her seem intelligent to you. I can read her whole mind at a glance, and there’s very little there. But she feels good. She would not want to be anything other than a cat.

Smart is smart. I’m glad there’s some around somewhere.