Category: Thought

Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million years in contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood, wind, and rain. Now this creature is suddenly — on the geologic scale, instantaneously — shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass, plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability but so little.

Jack Vance, “Rumfuddle,” Robert Silverberg (ed.), Three Trips in Time and Space (1973), Section 5 (p. 177).

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his own excreta.

Brian Aldiss, The Dark Light Years (1964).

The rewards for being sane are not very many but knowing what’s funny is one of them.

Kingsley Amis, Stanley and the Women. London: Hutchinson, 1984.

Méfie-toi de celui qui rit avant de parler!

Distrust the man who smiles before he speaks.

Alphonse Daudet, Tartarin sur les Alpes (1885); Katharine Prescott Wormeley (trans.) Tartarin of Tarascon. To Which is Added Tartarin on the Alps (Boston: Little, Brown, 1900) p. 241.

I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man’s accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.

Jack Vance, “The Last Castle,” Galaxy (April 1966).

Analysis and synthesis, though commonly treated as two different methods, are, if properly understood, only the two necessary parts of the same method. Each is the relative and correlative of the other. Analysis, without a subsequent synthesis, is incomplete; it is a mean cut off from its end. Synthesis, without a previous analysis, is baseless; for synthesis receives from analysis the elements which it recomposes

Sir William Hamilton, Ninth Baronet, “Sixth Lecture on Metaphysics” in Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1871), p. 69.

I have observed that the light-headed commonly get the best of everything in this world; which the wooden-headed and the beef-headed regard as an outrage. I am not prepared to say if it is or not.

Ambrose Bierce, under the pseudonym Dod Grile, “Love’s Labour Lost,” The Fiend’s Delight (1873).

Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed.

Robert A. Heinlein, “Solution Unsatisfactory,” Off the Main Sequence (2005), p. 98.

Truth like a torch, the more ’tis shook, it shines.

Sir William Hamilton, Ninth Baronet, as quoted by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 573.

Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds, but it has all been displaced babble. SF has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past, that today is “The Day After The World Ended.” . . . I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as “Western Civilization” or “Modern Civilization,” happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was “The World” for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general.

R.A. Lafferty, from “The Day After the World Ended,” notes for a speech at DeepSouthCon’79, New Orleans (July 21, 1979), later published in It’s Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995).