(If you are looking for The Notebooks of Lazurus Long anywhere in this section, forget it. In as much as that is published as a separate work in hard copy, I decline to carry it because of copyright considerations.)
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion -- i.e., none to speak of.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg ix
Pioneers care little about sending records to the home office; they are busy staying alive, making babies, and killing off anything in their way.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg x
A colonist too interested in statistics becomes a statistic himself -- as a corpse.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg x
At best, history is hard to grasp; at worst, it is a lifeless collection of questionable records.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg xi
It is clear that this man [Lazurus Long] is, by standards usual in civilized societies, a barbarian and a rogue.
But it is not for children to judge their parents.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg xii
As may be -- If today I see a man with sandy red hair, a big nose, an easy disarming grin, and a slightly feral look in his gray-green eyes, I always wonder how recently the Senior has passed through that part of the galaxy. If such a stranger comes close to me, I put my hand on my purse. If he speaks to me, I resolve not to make any wagers or promises.
--Justin Foote 45th, Time Enough For Love, pg xvi
Never tease an old dog; he might have one bite left.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 3
[Also quoted in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, 82. -MN]
Living on Secundus is a privilege, not a right.
--Ira Weatheral quoting Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 7
I don't give advice, people never take it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 8
Oh, I have strong opinions, but a thousand reasoned opinions are never equal to one case of diving in and finding out.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 9
I'm sorry I won't see the outcome of your experiment. I suspect it will be the hardest tyranny imaginable; majority rule gives the ruthless strong man plenty of elbow room to oppress his fellows.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 9
Son, the world doesn't pay off on a "good try".
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 10
A man ought not to have to die twice . . .
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 11
"By what ethical principal did you interfere with my death?"
"Because we need you, sir."
"That's not an ethical reason, just a pragmatic one. The need was not mutual."
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 11
I don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he's picking my pockets.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 11
Or, when the time comes, will you kid yourself that it is really your duty to hang on? If a man has the temperament for power -- and you have or you wouldn't be where you are -- he finds it hard to abdicate.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 12
Lazarus, I never let a man be executed for being a fool.
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 15
Ira, I learned centuries back that there is no privacy in any society crowed enough to need IDs. A law guaranteeing privacy simply insures that bugs -- microphones and lenses and so forth -- are that much harder to spot.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 15
Oh, knock it off, Bud; there's no virtue in being old, it just takes a long time.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 16
Ira, age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 19
I don't "believe" in anything. I know certain things -- little things, not the Nine Billion Names of God -- from experience. But I have no beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 20
I've never argued with the weather. Once a mob wanted to lynch me. I didn't try to reason with them; I just put a lot of miles between me and them as fast as I could and never went back there.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 20
I spent my boyhood the way every boy does -- trying to keep my elders from finding out what I was up to.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 22
Lying is one of the fine arts, Ira, and it seems to be dying out. [...] I mean as a fine art. There are still plenty of clumsy liars, approximately as many as there are mouths.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 22
(see also both entries for I Will Fear No Evil, 439, and Starman Jones, 159)
Correction. Most people won't learn even by experience, Ira. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 24
Live each day as if you were to die next sunrise. Then face each sunrise as a fresh creation and live for it joyously. And never think about the past. No regrets, ever.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 25
Son, that phrase is self-contradictory; "sense" is never "common".
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 26
I might want to revise my sparkling gems of wisdom -- meaning that extemporaneous remarks sound better when aren't extemporaneous -- or why politicians have ghost writers.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 26
No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad universe.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 30
I have never swindled a man. At most I have kept quiet and let him swindle himself. This does no harm, as a fool cannot be protected from his folly.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 31
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 31
[Probably quoting. --MN]
You're a sentimentalist, Grandson. But a good boy. Trouble is, there never has been much demand for good boys.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 32
Ishtar, all myths tell the truth if you know how to read them.
--Galahad, Time Enough For Love, pg 45
Half my time is used in the negative work of plucking such officious officials and ordering that they never again serve in any official capacity.
Then I usually abolish their jobs and all jobs subordinate to them.
I have never noticed any harm from such pruning save that parasites whose jobs have been eliminated must find some other way to avoid starvation. (They are welcome to starve -- better if they do. But they don't.)
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 47
Anyone can see a forest fire; skill lies in smelling the first smoke.
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 47
A population one billion-plus so contented, so uniform, so smug that not one determined assassin shows up in a double decade is seriously ill no matter how healthy it looks.
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 48
He was a hillbilly, which means that he came from an area uncivilized even by the loose standards of those days --
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 54
"Lazarus, what is a gentleman?"
"[...] A gentleman was supposed to prefer being a dead lion to being a live jackal. Me, I've always preferred to be a live lion, so that puts me outside the rules."
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 61
Every impossible rule has its loopholes, every general prohibition creates its own bootleggers.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 63
David decided to maintain a "low profile" -- always a smart decision when one is likely to be shot at.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 65
[...] -- talking is the second of the three real pleasures in life, and the only thing that sets us apart from the apes. Though just barely.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 66
In a way they were hazardous. So is breathing.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 67
The method used was called "dead reckoning", because if you didn't reckon it correctly you were dead --
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 69
[...] -- a capsule summary of most human "progress." By the time you learn how, it's too late.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 70
[...] "heroism" often consists in keeping your head in an emergency and doing the best you can with what you have, instead of panicking and being shot in the tail. People who fight this way win more battles than do intentional heroes; a glory hound often throws away the lives of his mates as well as his own.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 73
[...] the ways of God, and government, and girls are all mysterious and it is not given to mortal man to understand them.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 75
Some people are ants by nature; they have to work, even when it is useless. Few people have a talent for constructive laziness.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 77
Son, one of the weirdest things about the human animal is that it grows up physically years and years before its brain grows up.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 78
Good intentions are no substitute for knowing how a buzz saw works, Ira; the worst criminals in history have been loaded with good intentions.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 80
We always let water under the bridge lie where Jesus flang it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 91
I was intentionally appealing to her vanity -- and if you think computers don't have such human foibles, then I suggest that your experience with them is limited; Minerva always liked to be appreciated, and we two began to be a team after I realized this. What else can you offer a machine? Higher pay and longer vacations? Don't be silly.
--Ira Weatheral, Time Enough For Love, pg 100
[...] just a silly way to drown in vacuum. Thin and unpleasant. Minerva, the All Powerful in His Majestic Wisdom -- whatever that means -- made it possible for humans to die peacefully. That being so, unless one is forced to, it is silly to do it the hard way.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 102
[This from a guy who spent most of his not inconsiderable life opening virgin
planets and exploring the galaxy. For those who are familiar with the background of L. Long, it is difficult to regard this as anything but facetiousness or cynicism. Nonetheless, there is a large grain of truth in it. --MN]
(see also Rocket Ship Galileo, 150)
Danger for the sake of danger is for children who don't really believe they can be killed.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 102
[...] -- danger is no novelty. It is simply something to be faced when you can't run.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 102
You keep your biscuit trap shut, Son.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 105
Schoolteacher -- lost that job when they caught me teaching the kids the raw truth; a capital offense anywhere in the galaxy.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 108
Hard to show a profit -- or to conceal one -- if you don't know how the game is played. It's much safer to break a law knowingly than to do it through ignorance.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 108
But "faith" is for the congregation, Ira; it handicaps a priest.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 108
Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun -- and neither can stop the march of events.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 108
(see also To Sail Beyond The Sunset, 166)
Whoring is like military service, Ira -- okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 109
'Put not your faith in Princes', Ira; since they don't produce, they always steal.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 109
All it takes to get [a reform politician] to break his word is for someone to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater good of all the peepul. He'll geek.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 110
Man is a political animal, Ira. You can no more keep him from politicking than you can keep him from copulating -- and probably shouldn't try.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 111
If the human animal has any value at all, he is too valuable to be property. If he has an inner dignity, he is much too proud to own other men. I don't give a damn how scrubbed and perfumed he may be, a slave owner is subhuman.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 114 [Continued to quotation below]
But this does not mean that I'll cut my throat when I run into [slavery], or I would not have lived through my first century. For there is another bad thing about slavery, Ira; it is impossible to free slaves, they have to free themselves.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 114
[The inverse of Heinlein's ubiquitous theme: you cannot enslave a free man, you can only kill him; thereby creating the necessary corollary that one who is a slave by temperament will not seek freedom.
--MN]
In the first place, very little thinking was ever done in English; it is not a language suitable to logical thought. Instead, it's an emotive lingo beautifully adapted to concealing fallacies. A rationalizing language, not a rational one.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 120
The trouble with defining in words anything as basic as love is that the definition can't be understood by anyone who hasn't experienced it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 124
And I'm going to swap you for a dog, Sweetheart, and sell the dog.
--Ishtar, Time Enough For Love, pg 139
Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth -- but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 158
I've never wasted skull-sweat on revenge; the Comte de Monte-Cristo syndrome is too much work and not enough fun.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 158
Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter. Women know this instinctively; that's why they are all smugglers. Men often believe -- or pretend -- that the "law" is something sacred, or at least a science -- an unfounded assumption very convenient to governments.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 159
(see Tramp Royale, 194)
All "Eros" is custom, dear; there is never anything moral or immoral about copulation as such, or any of its nonfunctional frills. "Eros" is simply a way of keeping human beings, individuals, each different -- keeping them together and happy. It is a survival mechanism developed through long evolution, and its reproductive function is the least complex aspect of its very complex and pervasive role in keeping the human race going.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 170
But I tried to make sure they knew the difference between fiction and history -- difficult, as I wasn't certain that there was a difference.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 176
In my wanderings I have run across magic many times -- which simply says that I have seen wonders I could not explain.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 176
He shut up, realizing that grim old Mother Nature, red of tooth and claw, invariably punished damn fools who tried to ignore Her or repeal Her ordinances. He need not interfere.
--Time Enough For Love, pg 189
(see also I Will Fear No Evil, 353.)
Minerva, every so often some idiot tries to abolish marriage. Such attempts work as well as repealing the law of gravity, making pi equal to three point zero, or moving mountains by prayer. Marriage is not something thought up by priests and inflicted on mankind; marriage is as much a part of mankind's evolutionary equipment as his eyes, and as useful to the race as eyes are to an individual.
Surely, marriage is an economic contract to provide for children and to take care of mothers while they bear kids and bring them up -- but it is much more than that. It is the means this animal, Homo sap., has evolved -- quite unconsciously -- for performing this indispensable function and be happy while doing it.
Why do bees split up into queens, drones, and workers, then live as one big happy family? Because, for them it works. How is that fish do okay with hardly a nodding acquaintance between mama fish and papa fish? Because the blind forces of evolution made that work for them. Why is that "marriage" -- by whatever name -- is a universal institution among human beings everywhere? Don't ask a theologian, don't ask a lawyer; this institution existed long before it was codified by
church or state. It works, that's all; for all its faults it works far better by the only universal test -- survival -- than any of the endless inventions that shallow-pates over the millennia have tried to substitute for it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 194
Minerva, I make no apology for hypocrisy.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 195
Horns need not give a man a headache. But he does need time to grow up and mellow and acquire self-confidence before he can wear them with tolerance and dignity -- and Llita was just the girl who could outfit him with a fine rack of antlers.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 197
It was root, hog, or die. They were really free -- free to starve.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 207
Minerva, if I sell a horse, I won't guarantee that it has a leg on each corner; the buyer must count them himself.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 208
Half the battle with any culture is knowing its taboos.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 215
Joe, I learned long before you were born that free tail is invariably the most expensive sort.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 219
A man never cuts his throat from a sleepless night if has company to see him through it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 220
Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 220
'Incest' is a legal term, not a biological one. It designates sexual union between persons forbidden by law to marry. The act itself is forbidden; whether such union results in progeny is irrelevant. The prohibitions vary widely among cultures and are usually, but not always, based on degrees of consanguinity.
--Minerva, Time Enough For Love, pg 221
If a man pushes a rock, can he ignore an avalanche that follows?
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 222
My godson was no longer a child; he was an adolescent whose balls were not just ornaments.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 224
'Mutation' is never an explanation; it is simply a name for an observed fact.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 230
I'm not running down sex; sex is swell, sex is wonderful. But if you put a holy aura around it [...] sex stops being fun and starts being neurotic.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 233
"Rights" is a fictional abstraction. No one has "rights;" neither machines nor flesh-and-blood. Persons -- both sorts -- have opportunities, not rights, which they use, or do not use.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 234
No man owns his genes; he's merely their custodian. They are passed to him willy-nilly in the meiotic dance; he passes them along to others through the same blind chances.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 236
I would describe [a time machine] as an "unrealized potential". But mythical implies impossibility.
--Minerva, Time Enough For Love, pg 238
You turned down time travel forward . . . and I ruled out time travel into the past because you said you wanted something new.
--Minerva, Time Enough For Love, pg 238
A decent hardworking animal should not belong to a lazy bum.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 254
What's ten years? I can hold my breath that long.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 267
Force is an argument to use when nothing else will do and the issue is that important.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 267
Make money, lose money -- who cares? The idea is to enjoy it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 276
But we don't admit it because when you are outnumbered, it is neither safe nor comfortable to be a Howard.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 281
[...] Although it is sometimes expedient to make the neighbors think what you want them to think in order to influence what they do and say -- and this might be such a time.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 282
Sorry, dear. But there is always a last mistake.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 289
"If I must, it will be a mule we bought in New Pittsburgh. But if one of our three old friends die -- we eat him. Her."
"I don't think I could."
"You will when you're hungry enough. If you think about the baby inside you, you'll eat without hesitation and bless your dead friend for helping to keep your baby alive."
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 289
[conversation with Dora Smith nee Brandon. --MN]
Always take an honour guard with you. If you have to go, go down fighting. The size of your guard of honour determines your status in Hell.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 293
"I'm not 'little Dora.' I'm Rangy Lil, the horniest girl south of Separation -- you said so yourself. I cuss and I swear and I spit between my teeth and I'm concubine to Lazurus Long, Super Stud of the Stars and better than any six men -- and you know damned well what I want, and if you pinch my nipples again, I'm likely to trip you and take it. But I guess we ought to water the mules."
--Dora Smith nee Brandon, Time Enough For Love, pg 295
Sex is a learned art, as much so as ice skating or tightwire walking or fancy diving; it is not instinct. Oh, two animals couple by instinct, but it takes intelligence and patient willingness to turn copulation into a high and lively art.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 295
But, Minerva, love is what still goes on when you are not horny.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 295
It's no sin not to be pioneer-mother material -- but it is tragic for both husband and wife to find it out too late.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 298
Patience I have learned. The centuries may not give a man wisdom, but he acquires patience or he doesn't live through them.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 306
I had to consult her -- but I had to decide. Responsibility cannot be shared.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 309
The only rule I have about it this: Don't take unnecessary chances.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 312
[...] about raising kids. Praise them, never scream at them, punish as necessary and right now -- never a moment's delay -- then it's over with and forget it. Be as lavish with affection after a spanking as any other time -- or a bit extra.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 316
There is only one dangerous animal, yet at times you're forced to pretend that he's as sweet and innocent as a cobra.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 318
Durable, three-fourths of any [battle] lies in not hesitating when the time comes.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 325
... People who don't respect other people's property will do anything . . . and will steal anything that is not nailed down. Even if they have no use for it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 326
Such people should be destroyed on sight. The problem is to identify them.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 326
(see the quotation from 332.)
Perhaps our kids had a weird education . . . but a girl who can shape a comfortable and handsome saddle starting with a dead mule and not much else, solve quadratics in her head, shoot straight with gun or arrow, cook an omelet that is light and tasty, spout page after page of Shakespeare, butcher a hog and cure it can't be called ignorant by [pioneer] standards.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 328
I have never understood the gangster mind -- I simply know what to do about gangsters.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 332
(see the quotation from 326.)
Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow if tomorrow might improve the odds.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 334
[Pioneer survivors], smart, industrious, tolerant -- willing to fight when necessary, but not over trivial matters. Sex is not trivial, but fighting over it is usually pretty silly.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 338
Among such people the plural of "spouse" is "spice".
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 339
Bloodshed is not a spectator sport.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 356
I'll go where and when I please, see what I want to -- and try not to antagonize local yokels. Especially those fighting each other; it makes them trigger happy.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 357
The historicity of Jesus is the slipperiest question in all history because for centuries the question couldn't be raised. They would hang you for asking -- or burn you at the stake.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 357
Naw, just hardnosed. I've never let the privacy custom keep me from snooping when it suited me.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 369
"You [twins] are interchangeable parts, and besides, you were mixed up the week you were born, and nobody knows which you are; you don't know yourself."
"Oh, yes, I do! Sometimes she goes away, but I'm always right here."
--Loreli Lee Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 368
[A retort to Lazurus that he admitted might be an encapsulation of the philosophy of solipsism. --MN]
I designed it to be decadent, Justin. Good plumbing is the finest flower of decadence and one I have always enjoyed when I could get it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 370
Permit me to say, speaking from experience, all theories are empty.
--Flesh-and-Blood Minerva (Long), Time Enough For Love, pg 371
-- all machinery is animistic -- humanistic, I want to say, but that term has been preempted. Any machine is a concept of a human designer; it reflects a human brain, be it a wheelbarrow or giant computer. So there is nothing mysterious in a machine designed by a human showing human self-awareness; the mystery lies in awareness itself, wherever it's found. I used to have a folding camp cot that liked to bite me. I don't say that it was aware, but I learned to approach it
with caution.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 372
(see Cat Who Walks Through Walls, 107)
I was a bottle baby [...] In consequence I've been looking at tits and admiring them ever since.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 373
Better to know your resistance than be tripped through ignorance.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 379
And my superiority is never moral; it lies always in doing it first before he does it to me.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 391
"Lazurus, I noticed that you classed 'man' as a wild animal -- "
"He is. You can kill him, but you can't tame him. The worst bloodbaths in history derive from attempting to tame him."
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 392
'Savage' describes a cultural condition, not a degree of intelligence.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 393
But space travel can't ease the pressure on a planet grown too crowded not even with today's ships and probably not with any future ships -- because stupid people won't leave the slopes of their home volcano even when it starts to smoke and rumble. What space travel does do is drain off the best brains: those smart enough to see a catastrophe before it happens and with the guts to pay the price -- abandon home, wealth, friends, relatives, everything -- and go. That's a tiny fraction of one
percent. But that's enough.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 395
Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, and without self-delusion -- in the long run these are the only people who count.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 396
-- an irrational attitude I understand, as I am cursed with it myself.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 416
"What happened to Neanderthal Man? What happens to any champion when he's defeated? Justin, what's the point in striving when you're so outclassed that it's no contest?"
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 420
Galahad shows unexpected streaks of nobility. It'll get him killed yet.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 422
Sometimes the best one can do about a weak point is not to call attention to it.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 425
In all matters of government the correct answer is usually: Do nothing.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 428
-- a time to exercise creative inaction.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 428
The itch to be a worldsaver should not be scratched; it rarely does any good and can drastically shorten your life.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 428
-- well a man who refuses to take his own death into account in making plans is a fool. A self-centered fool who does not love anyone.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 432
A pilot who is not a pessimist isn't worth a hoot.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 434
"Lazi, you've heard me say nine thousand and nineteen times that we do not carry weapons to give us Dutch courage. If a gun makes you feel three meters tall and invulnerable, you had better go unarmed [...]"
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 435
(see Tunnel In The Sky, 32)
We don't shoot cops if there is any way to avoid it. Safer to kiss a rattlesnake.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 435
"Girls, it is hard to shake off any taboos a child is indoctrinated with in his earliest years. Even if he learns later that they are nonsense."
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 445
Whenever the locals rub blue mud in their navels, I rub blue mud in mine just as solemnly.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 461
(see To Sail Beyond The Sunset, 25)
Crazy -- a nonscientific term meaning that the person to whom one applies that label has a world picture differing from the accepted one.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 462
Conscription. I'm durned if I'll try to explain that term to girls who just barely know what a war is, but it means "slave armies" --
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 467
(I'm depressing myself -- hindsight is a vice . . . especially when it is foresight.)
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 469
Alexander Hamilton and Leonardo Da Vinci are in the same boat with you, to name just two of the many great men entitled to wear the bend sinister. So stand tall and proud and spit in their eyes.
--Ira Johnson, Time Enough For Love, pg 480
"Sin?" "Sin" like "love" was a word hard to define. It came in two bitter but vastly different flavors. The first lay in violating the taboos of your tribe.
[...]
The other meaning of "sin" was easier to define because it was not moulded by the murky concepts of religion and taboo: Sin is behaviour that ignores the welfare of others.
--Time Enough For Love, pg 489-490
But -- That was grounded on the assumption that his "no-paradoxes" theory was a law of nature. But you've long been aware that the "no-paradoxes" theory itself involves a paradox -- one that you've kept quiet about so as not to alarm Laz and Lor and the rest of your "present" (that present, not this one) family; to whit, the idea that free will and pre-destination are two aspects of the same mathematical truth, and the difference is merely linguistic, not semantic: the notion that his
free will could not change events here-&-now because his freewill actions here-&-now were already a part of what had happened in any later "here-&-now."
--Time Enough For Love, pg 490
The best thing about the future was that it was unknown. Cassandra's one good quality was she was never believed.
--Time Enough For Love, pg 507
Never take little bites, enjoy life!
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 509
Son, you are getting old -- why you've been living cautiously.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 510
All nows are equal; that is the basic theorem of time travel.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 562
For a lonely person of either sex, [masturbation] is [a] harmless but inadequate substitute.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 572
"See any [enemy], don't breathe. If they surprise us -- surrender at once."
"'Surrender'?"
"If you want to be a grandfather. You can't kill a [enemy] patrol all by your lonesome. Even if you could, it would make so much racket that their machine guns would chop you in two. Stick close and stay down."
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 584
Every animal finds its dieing place.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 585
Morals are your agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules. To thine own self be true or you spoil the game.
--Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 586
The trade routes for a two-way swap show minimum profit; they fill up too quickly. But a triangular trade - or higher numbers-can show high profits. Like this: Landfall had something - call it cheese-which was a luxury on Blessed - while Blessed produced - call it chalk - much in demand on Valhalla whereas Valhalla manufactured doohickeys that Landfall needed. Work this in the right direction and get rich; work it backwards and lose your shirt.
I had worked the first leg, Landfall to Blessed, successfully having sold my cargo of - Now what was it? Durned if I remember; I've handled so many things. Anyhow, I got such a nice price that I temporarily had too much money.
How much is "too much"? Whatever you can't spend before you leave a place you are not coming back to. If you hang onto that excess and come back later, you will usually find-invariably, so far as I recall-that inflation or war or taxes or changes in government or something has wiped out the alleged value of fiat money you may have kept.
--Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love, chapter 6
"Mary, a committee is the only form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 24
"Mary, if there is anything I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it's this: These things pass. Wars and Depression and Prophets and Covenants -- they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 24
He was aware of the present gentle custom against personal weapons, but he felt naked without them. Such customs were nonsense anyhow, foolishment from old women -- there was no such thing as a "dangerous weapon," there were only dangerous men.
--Methuselah's Children, pg 27
"It is proved that these people have solved the age-old problem of extending, perhaps indefinitely, the span of human life. For that, they are to be commended; it is a worthy and potentially fruitful research. But their claim that their solution is no more than genetic predisposition defies both science and common sense. Our modern knowledge of the established laws of genetics enables us to deduce with certainty that they are withholding from the public some secret technique or techniques whereby they accomplish their results.
"It is contrary to our customs to permit scientific knowledge to be held as a monopoly for the few. When concealing such knowledge strikes at life itself, the action becomes treason to the race. As a citizen I call on the Administration to act forcefully in this matter and I remind them that the situation is not one which could possibly have been foreseen by the wise men who drew up the Covenant and codified our basic customs. Any custom is man-made and is therefore a finite
attempt to describe any infinity of relationships. It follows as the night from day that any custom necessarily has its exceptions."
--Dr. Witwell Oscarsen, Methuselah's Children, pg 48
(see also Double Star, 128)
"Wants what he wants when he wants it -- and thinks that constitutes a natural law."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 49
"Bud, you strike me as a clear proof that the Foundation should 'a' bred for brains instead of age."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 57
"Huh? That's impossible!"
"Yep. So is a baby, Son."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 70
Lazurus knew from hard experience how close under the skin lay lynch law and mob violence in the most sweetly civilized; . . .
--Methuselah's Children, pg 94
. . . it reminded him of other days, when weather was something experienced rather than controlled. Life had lost some flavor, in his opinion, when the weather engineers had learned how to harness the elements.
--Methuselah's Children, pg 118
"Go for broke" took courage and character that most people didn't have. Don't grab a toothbrush, don't wind the cat -- just do it!
--Methuselah's Children, pg 128
"I've been listening but I could never learn it. I'm not a pilot."
"Huh? How did you get here?"
"Oh. I do have a license, but I haven't had time to keep in practise. My chauffeur always pilots me. I haven't had to figure a trajectory in years."
"And yet you plotted an orbit rendezvous? With no reserve fuel?"
"Oh, that. I had to."
--Slayton Ford, Methuselah's Children, pg 130
Free fall nausea, like seasickness, is a joke only to those not affected; . . .
--Methuselah's Children, pg 140
"You are attempting to apply verbal anthropomorphic logic to a field in which it is not pertinent."
--Andrew Jackson Libby, Methuselah's Children, pg 146
"Yeah, yeah, sure, you can't tell the taste till you bite it -- "
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 147
"The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics. The notion that 'Truth will prevail' is merely a pious wish. History doesn't show it."
--Ralph Shultz, Methuselah's Children, pg 153
[Echoing a similar sentiment, almost word for word, in Notebooks Of Lazurus Long. --MN]
"A captain puts spine into his ship...or doesn't, as the case may be."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 157
"It's not a man's place to be property."
"What is a man's place?"
"It's a man's business to be what he is . . . and be it in style!
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 210
"Mary, my sweet, carpe that old diem! -- it's the only game in town."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 216
"I've got no more prejudices than the Red Queen. Where does a phone image go when you cut the circuit?"
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 220
"'When it don't rain, the roof don't leak; when it rains I cain't fix it no how.'"
--quoted by Andrew Jackson Libby, Methuselah's Children, pg 233
He admitted that he was prejudiced in favor of men. He was a man.
--Methuselah's Children, pg 236
"This isn't a raiding party, Lazurus, this is a diplomatic mission."
"Hell, man! I can be diplomatic when it pays!"
"No doubt, but we'll send a man who doesn't go armed to the 'fresher."
--Captain Rufe "Ruthless" King, Methuselah's Children, pg 251
[Lazurus] had claimed publicly that the Families had such great scientific advantage that they could meet and defeat the best the Earth could offer. Privately, he knew that this was sophistry and so did any other Member competent to judge the matter. Knowledge alone did not win wars. The ignorant fanatics of Europe's Middle Ages had defeated the incomparably higher Islamic cultures; Archimedes had been struck down by a common soldier; barbarians had sacked Rome.
--Methuselah's Children, pg 252
"Politics. You dasn't scare anybody for fear they will squawk."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 269
"Ever see a little dog tell a big dog to get the hell out of his yard?"
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 273
"Between ourselves, I'm not as fast with my fists as I was a century back."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 275
"Lots of capacity and not time enough to use it properly. When it came to the important questions we might as well have still been monkeys."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 276
"There ought not to be anything in the whole universe that man can't poke his nose into -- that's the way we're built and I assume that there's some reason for it."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 276
". . . Andy, whatever the answers are, here's one monkey that's going to keep on climbing, and looking around him to see what he can see, as long as the tree holds out."
--Lazurus Long, Methuselah's Children, pg 276
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
--Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love