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Man Quotes

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Man Quotes

“As a science fiction writer who began as a fan, I do not use my fiction as a disguised way to criticize the reality of the present. I feel that the greatest appeal of science fiction is the creation of numerous imaginary worlds outside of reality. I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read. The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life’s evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe.”

“18. Your life is before you. Be careful of the choices you make now that you could regret later. This regret is the subject of an old poem whose author has been forgotten. I hope you’ll never have reason to apply it to yourself. Across the fields of yesterday, He sometimes comes to me A little lad just back from play— The boy I used to be. He looks at me so wistfully When once he’s crept within; It is as if he hoped to see The man I might have been.”

“Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." And universal history is the gigantic and thousand-year effort to go on putting order into that huge, disorderly, anti-animal fantasy. What we call reason is no more than fantasy put into shape. Is there anything in the world more fantastic than that which is the most rational? Is there anything more fantastic than the mathematical point, and the infinite line, and, in general, all mathematics and all physics? Is there a more fantastic fancy than what we call "justice" and the other thing that we call "happiness"?”

“What do you mean? In Old Castle? I still live with my parents in case you haven’t noticed, Jack. Those two strangers – that man and woman sitting on my sofa – are actually my parents. Oh, you mean your place? Yes, let’s evict your parents…let’s place them neatly in a cardboard box and leave it by the rubbish bins!”

“Wraths My soul is full of fire, Wrath and tempestuous dirge; I feel but one desire, To find a sword and scourge: Since man, by right of birth And nature’s gift at least A god upon the earth, Remaineth but a beast, Ill-ruling, blind and halt, And not by powers’ unknown, Or far-off Heaven’s, fault, But chiefly by his own. Lies!—let us drink them up, The sweet and bitter lies! Man takes the maddening cup And drinks and dreams and dies. Pure as revealing morn The angel Truth stands there; But we, oh basely born! Dare not to look at her. Not by eternal laws Condemn’d to eternal ruth, We suffer; but because We dare not face the truth. We wreath and sanctify us To the inferior gods; For things which vilify us We lash ourselves with rods. We rip our veins and bleed Before the gods of mire; For Moloch, without need, Consume our babes in fire; But the greatest God of all In eternal silence reigns; To His high audience-hall No human soul attains.”

“THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion....”

“But in his darkest hour, when it seemed he'd finally met his match, Superman returned. Some felt there was no truth or justice to a story where a man could come back from the dead. There'd only been one other bestseller in history to use that plot successfully. But the willful use of the impossible is exactly what comic book stories are for... to remind us that when the real world is too much to take, there's always a place we can go... where man, or Superman, can escape anything set against him.”

“Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.”

“By morning, Adelaide was beginning to understand why she'd never completely understood how God worked. Given that He had made the bewildering, maddening, incomprehensible species that was man from His own image, it stood to reason that the Creator would be a complicated mass of logic never meant to be understood by the female mind. That, or the fall of man in the Garden of Eden had taken them even further off the path than she'd ever realized”

“Man is now a new animal, a new and different animal; he can jump a hundred miles, see through brick walls, bombard atoms, analyse the stars, set about his business with the strength of a million horses. And so forth and so on. Yes. Yes. But all the same he goes on behaving like the weak little needy ape he used to be. He grabs, snarls, quarrels, fears, stampedes, and plays in his immense powder magazine until he seems likely to blow up the whole damned show.”

“In another thirty to fifty years, the demand for cheap labor will have produced even more machines over the employment of actual humans. And in that time frame, humans will have lost their voice, their power, all freedoms, and all worth. It is inevitable that machines will one day become the ultimate enemies of mankind. We are not evolving or progressing with our technology, only regressing. Technology is our friend today, but will be our enemy in the future.”