Top 55 Clifford D Simak Quotes
#1. Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.
Clifford D. Simak
#2. My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over.
Clifford D. Simak
#4. aimed not at military concentrations, but at total populations. He
Clifford D. Simak
#5. I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man's average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time , while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.
Clifford D. Simak
#6. He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age - of age and the outdated.
Clifford D. Simak
#7. The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.
Clifford D. Simak
#8. The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.
Clifford D. Simak
#9. Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth .
Clifford D. Simak
#10. What is a bow and arrow? It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war. It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering. It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.
Clifford D. Simak
#11. It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one another to the very edge of space.
Clifford D. Simak
#12. It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.
Clifford D. Simak
#13. Has it ever occurred to you that business as you think of it may have outlived its usefulness? Business has made its contribution and the world moves on. Business is just another dodo ...
Clifford D. Simak
#14. Unconventional," said Jenkins. "What is conventional?" asked Andrew. "Living in a dream? Living for a memory? you must be weary of it." "Not
Clifford D. Simak
#15. Squatted beside the fire, with the warmth of it upon his face and hands, he felt a smug contentment that seemed strangely out of place
the contentment of a man who had reduced his needs to the strictly basic
and with the contentment came a full-bodied confidence that was just as out of place.
Clifford D. Simak
#16. Much of what we see in the universe ... starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.
Clifford D. Simak
#17. A yellow leaf fluttered down from overhead and settled in his lap, a clear, almost transparent yellow against the brownness of the robe. He moved to brush it off and then he let it stay. For who am I, he thought, to interfere with or dispute even such a simple thing as the falling of a leaf. He
Clifford D. Simak
#18. But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that
Clifford D. Simak
#19. When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe.
Clifford D. Simak
#20. We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe
Clifford D. Simak
#21. Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.
Clifford D. Simak
#22. Delectable," Ulysses said. "Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.
Clifford D. Simak
#23. Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead?
Clifford D. Simak
#24. Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists.
Clifford D. Simak
#25. Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.
Clifford D. Simak
#26. It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species.
Clifford D. Simak
#27. I can't go back," said Towser.
"Nor I," said Fowler.
"They would turn me back into a dog," said Towser.
"And me," said Fowler, "back into a man.
Clifford D. Simak
#28. I'm just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn't have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly.
Clifford D. Simak
#29. If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.
Clifford D. Simak
#30. These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.
Clifford D. Simak
#32. If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.
Clifford D. Simak
#33. We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good.
Clifford D. Simak
#34. What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?
Clifford D. Simak
#35. That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.
Clifford D. Simak
#36. Race preservation is a myth ... a myth that you all have lived by - a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him - so far as he's concerned there is no longer any race.
Clifford D. Simak
#37. For it was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than a person.
Clifford D. Simak
#38. Jenkins tried to say goodbye, but he could not say goodbye. If he could only weep, he thought, but robots could not weep.
Clifford D. Simak
#39. With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing.
Clifford D. Simak
#40. Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.
Clifford D. Simak
#41. Less than an hour before he'd congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.
Clifford D. Simak
#42. Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?
Clifford D. Simak
#44. University politics," declared Oop, "doesn't care about liberal traditions or any other kind of traditions.
Clifford D. Simak
#45. Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it. He
Clifford D. Simak
#46. As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it. He
Clifford D. Simak
#47. He sat there thinking of Man's capacity for the wiping out of species
sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain.
Clifford D. Simak
#48. And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people's minds.
Clifford D. Simak
#49. Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.
Clifford D. Simak
#50. It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.
Clifford D. Simak
#51. Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.
Clifford D. Simak
#52. I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned with where we, as a race, may be going and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme - if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one.
Clifford D. Simak
#53. And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.
Clifford D. Simak
#54. This is the very center of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of everything.
Clifford D. Simak
#55. And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.
Clifford D. Simak
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