We have no value, she said to herself. We can live out our tiny lives. If we want to. If it matters to us.
Baritone, cultivated, rolling-out-smooth voice familiar to Reiss. ‘This is Doktor Goebbels.
Guilt is useless. The world torments us, and we react by tormenting ourselves. I wonder how we can ever have such a low opinion of ourselves that we join in.
You cook the native foods to perfection, Robert Childan thought. What they say is true: your powers of imitation are immense. Apple pie, Coca-Cola, stroll after the movie, Glenn Miller... you could paste together out of tin and rice paper a completely artificial America. Rice-paper Mom in the kitchen, rice-paper Dad reading the newspaper. Rice-paper put at his feet. Everything.
Everything’s the same, when you break through to absolute reality; it’s all one vast blur.
Being crazy and getting caught at it, out in the open, turns out to be a way to wind up in jail.
The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?
And after all, they had been successful with the Jews and Gypsies and Bible Students.
Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A – there was something about that which absolutely fascinated me.
I’m sorry,” Leon said. “I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe they’re flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I and three billion other people are not, and until it changes here it won’t be enough, Phil; not enough. Despite the supreme heavenly father. He has to do something for us here, and that’s the truth. If you believe in the truth – well, Phil, that’s the truth. The harsh, unpleasant truth.
And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.
He didn’t just know there would be personal computers. He knew they would crash, that the people who came to fix them would charge heavily by the hour, and be annoying, and no good, and in the end would just tell you to buy a new and more expensive machine –.
I used to condemn junkies, like they could get off the stuff if they really wanted to, and that is just as stupid as saying, “You could grow eyes in the back of your head if you really wanted to.
Italy being a traitor?” His voice grated. “The Duce – he was a clown; we all know that.
That McCarthy, he thought, is a damn good shop foreman. He has the knack of needling a man, getting him to put out his best efforts, to do his utmost in spite of himself. He’s a natural leader; he almost inspired me, for a moment, there.
While translated one could commit incest, murder, anything, and it remained from a juridical standpoint a mere fantasy, an impotent wish only.
Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective realities.
Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It’s a big business, I am told.
Do you know what the true basis of political power is? Not guns or troops but the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. By whatever means are appropriate.
God, what a dreadful thing – the truth.