William Tenn Quotes

Thank you very much for your lesson, but now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go on, please. Some of us aren’t civil service workers: our time is valuable.

A man doesn’t volunteer for a hitch in hell just so he can knock off one of the devils.

Science, my forward-looking friend, is a complex of interlocking theories, all derived from observation.

I've always been a loner. With whatever help I can buy, I take care of myself. I'm not interested in any goal except the extra buck. First and last, I'm a businessman."
"Oh, stop it!" the dark man took a turn up and down the office angrily. "This is a planet-wide emergency. There are times when you can't be a businessman."
"I deny that. I can't conceive of such a time."
Braganza snorted. "You can't be a businessman if you're strapped to a huge pile of blazing faggots. You can't be a businessman if people's minds are so thoroughly controlled that they'll stop eating at their leader's command. You can't be a businessman, my slavering, acquisitive friend, if demand is so well in hand that it ceases to exist."
"That's impossible." Hebster had leaped to his feet. To his amazement, he heard his voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. "There's always demand. Always! The trick is to find what new form it's taken and then fill it!"
"Sorry. I didn't mean to make fun of your religion.

Haven’t you ever heard it said that money isn’t everything, but that what it isn’t it can buy?

He reached into his soul for an article of fundamental faith, found it. “I can make money,” he quoted to himself. “That’s what I’m good for. That’s what I can always do.”

They said you treated them very well, that you showed them as much respect as a thing like you could generate. They also said you cheated them."
"Oh, well, Theseus," Hebster spread his manicured hands. "I'm a businessman.

But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. “It’s always darkest,” he told himself with determined triteness, “before the dawn.” And then found himself involuntarily adding, “Except on days when there’s an eclipse.”

They are a highly individualistic people and still experience many frictions living in a centralized society. Despite several centuries of advanced civilization, most Gtetans look upon the Law as a delightful problem in circumvention rather than as a way of life.

Wh-who are you? And what do you want?"
"Joseph Burns, a poor but honest newspaperman." He considered for a moment. "Well, poor, anyway.

Irving Bommer looked like a man who had gone down into the Valley of the Shadow and had seen much more there to fear than such picayune things as Evil.

It's a rough war, isn't it?"
I smiled back. "Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it.

The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man.

Whether or not the science fiction will eventually develop a Shakespeare, I would not dare to predict. But I do claim that it is a literature produced by our times as much as Shakespeare's was by his. And its unfortunate, frequent vulgarities can well be equated with the vulgarities and plebeian absurdities of much Elizabethan writing, both reflecting the primitive vitality of the mass audience that responded to them. It is, of course, in any age, only moribund fiction that is polished to a point of antisepsis, and that will, in losing touch with its audience, “lose the name of action.” This new medium has as yet lost neither.

Science fiction, thus considered, is not a mere pocket in the varicolored vest of modern writing; it is a new kind of fiction, the beginnings of a long-delayed revolution in letters consequent upon the revolutions that the last two hundred years have witnessed in science, industry, and politics. By this I do not at all mean that it is the only possible literature of the present time, just that it is the type most peculiar to it, most indicative of its larger intellectual trends.