I have never liked riding the beanstalk. [...] A cable that goes up into the sky with nothing to hold it up smells too much of magic.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 1
The air felt thick and too warm to breathe; almost at once my clothes were soggy with sweat; I could feel my feet starting to swell -- and besides they ached from full gee.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 3
Besides, as my boss says, with all governments everywhere tightening down on everything wherever they can, with their computers and their Public Eyes and ninety-nine other sorts of electronic surveillance, there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever possible -- keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers. Computers are literal-minded and stupid; electronic records aren't really records . . . so it is good to be alert to
opportunities to foul up the system.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
The key to traveling halfway around a planet without leaving tracks is: Pay cash. Never credit, never anything that goes into a computer.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
No matter how lavishly overpaid, civil servants everywhere are convinced that they are horribly underpaid -- but all public employees have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn't be feeding at the public trough.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
-- A public employee, having no self-respect, needs and demands a show of public respect.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
I didn't count the fact that the Nairobi Hilton blew up and burned a few minutes after I took the tube for Mombasa; It would have seemed downright paranoid to think that it had anything to do with me. [...] If the opposition wanted to cancel me -- possible but unlikely -- it would be swatting a fly with an ax to destroy a multimillion crown property and kill or injure hundreds or thousands of others just to get me. Unprofessional.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 5
I was taught in basic that no place is ever totally safe and that any place you habitually return to is your top danger spot, the place most likely for booby trap, ambush, stakeout.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 8
Hindsight is wonderful -- it shows you how you busted your skull . . . after you've busted it.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 9
I decided that, with training, he could have been a pro. Nevertheless he was a bloody amateur and I didn't respect him.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 11
If you are ever questioned under pain, do scream. The Iron Man routine just makes them worse and it worse. Take it from one who's been there. Scream your head off and crack as fast as possible.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 14
Clothes? Forget them -- not only did I have no idea where my clothes might be but also there is no time to stop to dress when you are running for your life.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 16
. . . any novelty in smuggling becomes useless once word gets around.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 19
"Friday, in our profession it is undesirable to hold grudges."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 22
"'Human. All Too Human.' Gossip is a vice."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 22
"When a ship is sinking one does not worry about the diningroom linens."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 24
"High esteem." When you have never belonged and can never really belong, words like that mean everything. They warmed me so much that I didn't mind not being human.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 25
"We each have a moral obligation to conserve and preserve beauty in this world; there is none to waste."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 26
"Self-defense sometimes must take the form of 'Do unto others what they would do unto you but do it first.' De Camp, I believe. Or some other of the twentieth century school of pessimistic philosophers."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 27
"Friday, one of your weaknesses is that you lack appropriate conceit."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 28
"An honorable hatchet man does not kill by reflex; he kills by planned intent. If the plan goes so far wrong that he needs to use self-defense, he is almost certain to become a statistic. In his planned killings, he always knows why and agrees with the necessity. Or I do not send him."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 28
Boss's habitual understatement is such that he would describe the total destruction of Seattle as "a seismic disturbance."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 31
I could walk into a washroom and not be told to use the end stall. But a phony ID and a fake family tree do not keep you warm; they just keep you from being hassled and discriminated against. You are still aware that there isn't any nation anywhere that considers your sort fit for citizenship and there are lots of places that would deport you or even kill you -- or sell you -- if your cover-up ever slipped.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 32
". . . as I have a trained forgettery."
--Anna Johansen (classified documents clerk); Friday, pg 34
"If I were any weller you'd have to bleed me."
"Well is an absolute; it has no comparative."
"Okay, I'm wellest."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 35
"'Birthright.' Don't make jokes, Boss; you have no talent for it. 'My mother was a test tube; my father was a knife.'"
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 36
It isn't any one thing; it's a million little things that are the difference between being reared as a human child and being raised as an animal.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 36
"Friday, don't despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool, merit or demerit lies in how it is used."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 37
"Friday, brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value. Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving the stupid ones in place. It took only a few careful 'accidents' to ruin utterly the great Prussian military machine and turn it into a blundering mob. But this did not show until the fighting was well under way, because stupid fools look just as good as military geniuses
until the fighting starts."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 37
I like to ride the semi-ballistics -- a high gee blastoff that always feels as if the cradle would rupture and spurt fluid all over the cabin, the breathless minutes in free fall that feel as if your guts were falling out, and then reentry and that long, long glide that beats any sky ride ever built. Where can you have more fun in forty minutes with your clothes on?
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 39
"It is with deep sorrow that we pause to announce the total destruction of Acapulco. This flash comes to you courtesy of Interworld Transport Proprietary . . . "
--Friday, pg 42
. . . there is not yet a truly lovely city off Earth. Luna City is underground, Ell Five looks like a junkyard from outside and has only one arc that looks good from inside. Martian cities are mere hives, and most Earth cities suffer from a misguided attempt to look like Los Angeles.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 44
Very nice. But my mind's made up.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 46
Properly regarded, male vanity is a virtue, not a vice. Treated correctly, it makes him enormously pleasanter to deal with.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 47
"You don't know any better. You've never been anywhere and you probably soaked up racism with your mother's milk."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 57
I'm not sure how the subject of artificial persons got into the discussion. I think it was while Vickie was "proving" still another time how free she was from racial prejudice while exhibiting that irrational attitude every time she opened her mouth.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 59
"We have to find loopholes like that to avoid being persecuted by the ignorant and the prejudiced."
"Meaning that I'm ignorant and prejudiced?"
"Meaning that you are a sweet girl who was fed a pack of lies by her elders. I'm trying to correct that. But if the shoe fits you can lie in it."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 61
"In dealing with the law and with people I have found a vast difference between 'should' and 'is.'"
--Brian Davidson; Friday, pg 64
Why had I done it?
Anger.
I wasn't able to find any better answer. Anger at the whole human race for deciding that my sort isn't human and therefore not entitled to equal treatment and equal justice. Resentment that had been building up since the first day that I had been made to realize that there are privileges human children had just from being born and that I could never have simply because I was not human.
Passing as human gets one over on the side of privilege. It does not end resentment against the system.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 70
Bare feet are as provocative as bare breasts, although most people do not seem to know it. A female packaged only in a lava-lava is far more provocative than one totally nude.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 72
Being creche raised, I can never know enough about human manners and etiquette but I do know that a woman guest must dress -- or undress -- to match her hostess.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 75
Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 77
"Man o' mine, you don't 'got' to do nothing except pay taxes and die."
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 87
(What would you have us do, Ian? Cut our throats? We didn't ask to be produced any more than you asked to be born. We may not be human but we share the age-old fate of humans; we are strangers in world we never made.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 88
"A computer can become self-aware -- oh certainly! Get it up to human level of complication and it has to become self-aware. Then it discovers that it is not human. Then it figures out that it can never be human; all it can do is sit there and take orders from humans. Then it goes crazy."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 93
"One might almost define intelligence as the level at which an aware organism demands 'what's in it for me?'"
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 94
From their expressions and thoughtful nods I saw that my hosts and hostess agreed with most of the choices [for assassination]. The deputy to the Prime Minister was on the list but not the Prime Minister herself -- to my surprise and perhaps more so to hers. How would you feel if you had spent your whole life in politics, scrambled all the way to the top, then some smart yabber comes along and says you aren't even important enough to kill? A bit like being covered up by a cat!
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 96
("What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate and washed his hands. I had no answers so I kept quiet.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 97
"If the horse can't jump the hurdle, shoot the horse. Keep on doing this and eventually you will find a horse that can clear the jump -- if you don't run out of horses. This is the sort of plausible pseudologic that most people bring to political affairs. It causes one to wonder if mankind is capable of being well governed by any system of government.
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 97
"Government is a dirty business."
"True. But assassination is even dirtier."
--George Perrault in reply to Ian Tormey; Friday, pg 97
"They carried the 'stink of piety' too. I got downwind of them once, then moved quickly."
--Ian Tormey; Friday, pg 101
"Brother, I am not joking; I am weeping. One gang plans to shoot me on sight, another merely outlaws my art and profession, while the third by threatening without specifying is, so it seems to me, even more to be dreaded. Meanwhile, lest I find comfort simply in physical sanctuary, this beneficent government, my lifetime alma mater, declares me enemy alien fit only to be penned. What shall I do? Joke? Or drip tears on your neck?"
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 105
"One thing every woman knows but few men ever learn is that there are times when the only wise course of action is not to act but to wait."
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 105
"I know you two. Both of you would like to run down to the recruiting office, enlist for the duration, and thereby turn your consciences over to the sergeants. This served your fathers and grandfathers, and I am truly sorry that it can't serve you."
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 105
"Don't be noble, dear, it doesn't suit you."
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 106
"What's the point in saving her life if you turn her over to a sex-crazed Canuck?"
--Ian Tormey; Friday, pg 106
"Although that body would not be dead if its owner were smart enough to pour pee out of a boot."
--Janet Tormey; Friday, pg 110
She is about as tender-hearted as a Medici.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 111
"My brother, one should never tempt one of the dear ones to lie."
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 116
I don't argue with lasers; you can neither bribe them nor sweet-talk them --
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 117
A banty rooster strutted in.
Actually, it was not Dickey's body but his soul that was small. Dickey had a size twelve ego in a size four soul, . . .
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 119
-- Why do men with little souls have to have big weapons?
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 120
The coldest depth of Hell is reserved for people who abandon kittens.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 123
"This 'human' and 'not-human' dichotomy is something thought up by ignorant laymen; everybody in the profession knows that it is nonsense. Your genes are human genes; they have been most carefully selected. Perhaps that makes you superhuman, it can't make you non-human."
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 133
"It takes a human mother to bear a human baby. Don't ever forget that."
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 133
My second impression was that he was even homelier than pictures, cartoons, and terminal images showed him to be -- and that opinion stayed. Like many a politico before him, Tumbril had turned a distinctive, individual ugliness into a political asset.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 148
As may be, "Warwhoop" Tumbril looked like a frog trying to be a toad and just missing.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 149
"There you are. Everybody is Equal, and Everybody has a vote. But you have to draw the line somewhere. Now shut-up, damnit, and don't interrupt while your betters are talking."
-- "Warwhoop" Tumbril; Friday, pg 149
I'm not upset by co-ed plumbing -- after all, I was raised in a creche -- but I have noticed that men and women, given a chance to segregate, do segregate.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 151
"The simplest sort [of code] and thereby impossible to break. The first ad told the person or persons concerned to carry out number seven or expect number seven or it said something about something designated as seven. This one says the same with respect to code item number ten. But the meaning of the numbers cannot be deduced through statistical analysis because the code can be changed long before a useful statistical universe can be reached. It's an idiot code, Friday, and an idiot code
can never be broken if the user has the good sense not to go too often to the well."
--George Perrault; Friday, pg 163
Field operatives, even common soldiers, are expensive; management does not expend them casually. A trained assassin costs at least ten times as much as a common soldier: she is not expected to get herself killed -- goodness me, no! She is expected to make the kill and get out, scot free.
But whoever was running this show had gone bankrupt in one night.
Unprofessional.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 165
It is not written in the stars that I will always understand what is going on -- a truism that I often find damnably annoying.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 165
I did not offer to pay the Hunters. There are human people who have very little but are rich in dignity and self-respect. Their hospitality is not for sale, nor is their charity. I am slowly learning to recognize this trait in human people who have it. In the Hunters it was unmistakable.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 178
I went back to the fence while concluding that Hannah Jensen was not a lady. She had no excuse to be rude to the Greenies merely because they were unspeakably vile. Even black widows, body lice, and hyenas have to make a living although I could never see why.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 185
I do not kill everyone with whom I have a difference of opinion and I would not want anyone reading this memoir to think that I do.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 186
. . . started using my brain instead. That's harder work than using muscles but it's quieter and burns fewer calories. It's the only thing that separates us from the apes, although just barely.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 192
But a credit card is an insidious thing -- just a cheap little piece of plastic . . . that can equate to great stacks of gold bullion. It was up to me to protect that card personally and at any cost, until I could place it in Janet's hand. Nothing else was honest.
A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy . . . or at best protects her privacy only with great effort and much chicanery. Besides that, do you ever know what the computer network is doing when you poke your card into a slot? I don't. I feel much safer with cash. I've never heard of anyone who had much luck arguing with a computer.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 195
It seems to me that credit cards are a curse. But I'm not human and probably lack the human viewpoint (in this as in so many, many other things.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 195
How many people have died because they could not abandon their baggage?
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 195
An artificial person never understands human people's sexual codes; all we can do is memorize them and try to stay out of trouble. But this isn't easy; human sexual codes are as contorted as a plate of spaghetti.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 197
I was taught in creche to class coition with eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping, playing, talking, cuddling -- the pleasant necessities that make life a happiness instead of a burden.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 198
If I want a man to refrain from discussing my sweaty clumsiness in bed, the only solution is to stay out of bed with him.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 200
Female tears are reputed to be a powerful aphrodisiac to most men and your own experience bears that out. (Crypto-sadism? Machismo? Who cares? It works.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 206
No matter who or what, a box of flowers is better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 206
Human people are so cocksure that they can always spot an AP -- blah! We can't even spot each other.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 207
Who is too sensitive? You are Friday.
But damn it, most humans do discriminate against our sort. Kick a dog often enough and he becomes awfully jumpy.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 208
"All right, you're tentatively you. But if you're not, I'll make a small bet with you that you won't live past the next checkpoint. Mr. Two-Canes is reputed to be unamused by gatecrashers."
--Gloria Tomosawa; Friday, pg 210
"Stop the stupid talk; it ill befits a genius."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 214
"Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 214
"Friday, a well run tyranny is a better base for my work than is any form of free government. But a well run tyranny is almost as scarce as an efficient democracy."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 216
"Huh?"
"Don't grunt; it is not pleasing in a young woman."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 218
There was no reason for any of us to be bored as we had full individual terminal service. People are so used to the computer net today that it is easy to forget what a window to the world it can be -- and I include myself. One can grow so canalized in using a terminal only in certain ways -- paying bills, making telephone calls, listening to news bulletins -- that one can neglect its richer uses. If a subscriber is willing to pay for the service, almost anything can be done at a terminal
that can be done out of bed.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 219
German is unsuited to lyricism, so much so that translations fall sweeter on the ear than do the German originals. This is no fault of Goethe or Heine; it is a defect of an ugly language.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 222
Fooey! I had wandered into a funny farm and was locked up with the inmates.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 226
I was tempted to spend the next three hours in lotus chanting my beads. But I have a deep conviction that one should not attend the End of the World without a good breakfast . . .
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 226
"Friday, your greatest weakness is your lack of awareness of your true strength."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 227
"Wouldn't we look silly if we depended on the professional analysts but the outbreak was one year earlier, as you predicted? Catastrophe. But to be a year early in taking prophylactic measures does no harm."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 227
"[...] In the third place, from the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the process by which overcrowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness. Plague is a nasty death but a quick one. Starvation also is a nasty death . . . but a very slow one."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 227
(Ridiculous! Any government public health department, faced with such a question, would set up a blue-ribbon study group, insist on ample research funds, and schedule a reasonable time -- five years or more -- for orderly scientific investigation.) I answered at once, . . .
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 227
"Boss, killing a rat is no problem. Stuff it into a sack. Beat the sack with an ax. Then shoot it. Then drown it. Burn the sack with the dead rat in it. Meanwhile its mate has raised another litter of pups and you now have a dozen rats to replace it."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 228
"Piffle. Soft-headed nonsense. Friday, you overstress the human will to die. We have had the means to commit racial suicide for generations now and those means are and have been in many hands. We have not done so. In the second place, to replace us, rats would have to grow enormously larger skulls, develop bodies to support them, learn to walk on two feet, develop their front paws into delicate manipulative organs -- and grow more cortex to control all this. To replace man
another breed must become man. Bah. Forget it."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 228
"Boss, there ain't no such animal as a well-documented conspiracy. Or sometimes too well documented but the documents contradict each other. If a conspiracy happened quite some time ago, a generation or longer, it becomes impossible to establish the truth. Have you ever heard of a man named John Fitzgerald Kennedy?" . . .
[...]
Killed in front of hundreds of witnesses and every aspect, before, during, and after, heavily documented. All that mountain of evidence adds up to is this: Nobody knows who shot him, how many shot him, how many times he was shot, who did it, why it was done, and who was involved in the conspiracy if there was a conspiracy. It isn't even possible to say whether the murder plot was foreign or domestic.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 229
"All that can truthfully be said is that the people who come out on top write the official versions found in the history books, history that is no more honest than is autobiography."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 229
"Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 230
"When I was younger, I thought I could change this world. Now I no longer think so but for emotional reasons I must keep on fighting a holding action."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 230
"Friday, you are developing a bureaucratic mind. 'Job title' indeed!"
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 231
"Friday, you are well aware that the absence of Eyes and Ears today simply means that they are concealed."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 231
"Study it yourself. If I told you, you would not know; you would simply have been told. Study it thoroughly and some night -- when you are sleeping alone -- I will ask you. You will answer and then you will know."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 231
Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket to carry it.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 234
"The people's right to know" -- the people's right to know what? [...] In this case the trouble with "the people's right to know" is that it strongly resembles the "right" of someone to be a concert pianist -- but who does not want to practise.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 236
But I am prejudiced, not being human and never having had any rights.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 236
"What are the marks of a sick culture?"
"It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population."
"A very bad sign. Particularism. It was once considered a Spanish vice but any country can fall sick with it."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 240
"So far as I have listened, before a revolution can take place, the population must lose faith in both the police and the courts."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 240
"It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can't be enforced weakens all other laws."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 241
"Boss, laws to sweep back the tide never do work; that's what King Canute was saying."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 241
"Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named . . . but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 242
"Friday, it is too late to save this culture -- this worldwide culture, . . . Therefore we must now prepare the monasteries for the coming Dark Age. Electronic records are too fragile; we must again have books, of stable inks and resistant paper. But that may not be enough. The reservoir for the next renaissance may have to come from beyond the sky."
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 242
He didn't feel sorry for himself, he didn't feel sorry for me, and he scolded me more than once for self-pity. Self-pity, he said, is the most demoralizing of all vices.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 244
Then I reminded myself that Boss would not have liked me at all if I had been a worm, subservient, no opinions of my own.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 244
"Burt, don't ever tackle a lawyer with your hands. The way to fight a lawyer is with another lawyer, a smarter one."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 250
Assassination is usually a dirty business . . . but honorable hatchet men can be heroes.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 251 (posthumous letter)
A perfect result derives from a willingness to discard any attempt less than perfect.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 251 (posthumous letter)
A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong -- and you are strong. The great trouble with religion -- any religion -- is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason -- but one cannot have both.
--Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 253 (posthumous letter)
I don't see anything wrong with crying; it lubricates the psyche.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 253
I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people -- and parasites.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 257
Sex is a better tranquilizer than any of those drugs and much better for your metabolism.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 257
I don't see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn't anything complex; it is simply the best thing in life, even better than food.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 257
Las Vegas is a three-ring circus with a hangover.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 260
Income tax? What a filthy suggestion! I could not believe my ears.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 260
"I never did think well of Anna's plans to become a professional grandmother; that's a form of suicide."
--Sylvia (Goldie) Havensisle; Friday, pg 270
Boss had hinted that I might be some sort of superman -- if so, I can testify that there is very little demand for supermen.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 274
Is any of this in the company brochures? Hollow laugh!
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 284
I do hope I grow up before Cheyne-Stokes breathing sets in.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 285
"A secret just a bit broached is like a girl just a little bit pregnant."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 294
That sounds like a violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy. I was brought up to bathe regularly and to believe that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch; I told him so.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 294
However, Miss Rich Bitch is not required to be bright.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 304
They are very old, very rich, and extremely self-centered -- save for a bare handful who have managed to grow old without turning sour.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 304
(Life-as-we-don't-know-it is a fascinating subject but has nothing to do with colonization by Earth people.)
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 318
But I would as lief miss Armageddon.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 319
But a spy is not entitled to the friendly consideration that a servant always rates.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 320
How can anyone get to be seventy years (she was at least that) without knowing that no one "decided" to settle on Outpost . . . except in the limited sense that one "decides" to accept transportation as the only alternative to death or life imprisonment.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 322
"I thought that pregnancy tests today were service-while-you-wait?"
"Get along with you. Your great-grandmother used to find out through her waistband becoming too tight. You're spoiled."
--Dr. Jerry Madsen; Friday, pg 323
The trouble with this sort of mission is that, after an agent has successfully completed it, something permanent happens to that agent, something that keeps him from talking, then or later. So, no matter how lavish the fee, it is well to avoid this class of mission.
--From a basic training lecture by Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin; Friday, pg 325
If you don't believe that such things can happen, we aren't living in the same world and there is no point in your reading any more of this memoir. Throughout history the conventional way of dealing with an awkward witness has been to arrange for him to stop breathing.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 329
The closest the Forward ever gets to a planet is its stationary orbit -- for Botany Bay that is about thirty-five thousand kilometers. That's a long way to go in some very thin vacuum.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 329
This is not a problem rough stuff can solve.
That leaves sweet talk, sex appeal, and bribery.
Wait! What about honesty?
Huh?
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 330
"They are trying to ensure that their whole planet will have a single language."
"I heard something about that. Why?"
"Some notion that they are less likely to have wars. Maybe so . . . but the bloodiest wars in history have been fratricidal wars. No language problem."
--Tom Udell, Assistant Supercargo, HSS Forward; Friday, pg 333
I had seen a face behind a full beaver -- meaning I hadn't seen it. Put a full beard on a man and all you see is the shredded wheat.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 339
There is a lot of obsolete engineering that is still useful in the colonies . . .
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 341
"Pete, if you are trying to sweet talk me into untying you, you are barking down the wrong well."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 343
People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living.
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 353
I think that's all anybody wants. To belong. To be "people."
--Marjorie Friday Baldwin; Friday, pg 357
"It's not a hearing aid, [...] it's a radio tuned to the emergency frequency."
"Mr. Farnham! You think they are going to attack?"
"The Kremlin doesn't let me in on its secrets."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 5
"When you moved into your own apartment, we agreed to live as friends. As my friend your opinions are welcome. But that does not make you free to interfere between your mother -- my wife -- and myself."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 6
"I'm not joking, Dad. Krushchev said he would bury us -- and you're making it come true. I'm not going to crawl into a hole in the ground."
--Duke Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 7
She did not mind admitting that she was a one-time loser but she resented the assumption that any divorcee was available.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 9
With sudden warmth she realized that if Duke Farnham had half the strong masculine charm his father had, a panty girdle wouldn't be much protection. She dismissed it by being quickly angry with Grace Farnham. What excuse did a woman have for being an incipient alcoholic, fretful and fat and self-indulgent, when she had this man.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 9
"Three spades, game and rubber. Well bid, partner."
Well played, you mean. I invited too much."
"Not at all. At worst we would have been down one. If you don't bet, you can't win."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 10
"I would rather have your respect than your tolerance."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 10
"If those lying, cheating bastard ever throw their murder weapons at the United States, I want to live long enough to go to hell in style -- with eight Russian sideboys!
"I mean it, Duke. America is the best thing in history, I think, and if those scoundrels kill our country, I want to kill a few of them. Eight sideboys. Not less. I felt relieved when Grace refused to consider moving."
"Why, Dad?"
"Because I don't want that pig-faced peasant with the manners of a pig to run me out of my own home! I'm a free man. I intend to stay free. I've made every preparation I can. But I don't relish running away."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 13
"Aren't you being rather high-handed?"
"I intend to be. This shelter is a lifeboat and I am boat officer. For the safety of all I shall maintain discipline. Even if it means tossing someone overboard."
"That's a farfetched simile. Dad, it's a shame you were in the Navy. It gives you romantic ideas."
"I think it's a shame, Duke, that you never had service. You're not realistic."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 22
"In a lifeboat, how do you tell the boat officer?"
"Is that a riddle?"
"No. The boat officer is the one with the gun."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 24
"Child, if you can get comfortable, or less uncomfortable, do so."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 34
"You don't own a cat, he is a free citizen. Take dogs; dogs are friendly and fun and loyal. But slaves. Not their fault, they've been bred for it. But slavery makes me queasy, even in animals."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 34
"Barbara, I'm not as sad over what has happened as you are. It might be good for us. I don't mean us six; I mean our country."
"How?"
"Well -- It's hard to take the long view when you are crouching in a shelter and wondering how long you can hold out. But -- Barbara, I've worried for years about our country. It seems to me that we have been breeding for slaves -- and I believe in freedom. This war may have turned the tide. This may be the first war in history which kills the stupid rather than the bright and able -- where it makes any distinction."
"How do you figure that, Hugh?"
"Well, wars have always been hardest on the best young men. This time the boys in service are as safe or safer than civilians. And of those civilians who used their heads and made preparations stand a far better chance. Not every case, but on the average, and that will improve the breed. When it's over, things will be tough, and that will improve the breed still more. For years the surest way of surviving has been to be utterly worthless and breed a lot of worthless kids. All that will change."
"That's standard genetics. But it seems cruel."
"It is cruel. But no government yet has been able to repeal natural laws, though they keep trying."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 35
"Hugh?"
"Yes, Barbie?"
"We're going to die. Aren't we?"
"Yes."
"I thought so. Before morning?"
"Oh, no! I feel sure that we can live till noon. If we want to."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 39
[Dialogue between Hugh Farnham and Barbara Wells. --MN]
"Quit fishing for compliments. I like your feet. You would look unfinished without them."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 41
"When Joe can spare you, Karen, scrounge some breakfast. We've got to eat even if this is Armageddon."
"And Armageddon sick of it."
--Karen Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 41
"Karen, Antabuse doesn't stop the craving; it simply makes the patient deathly ill if he drinks. If your estimate of our chances is correct, can you see any reason why I should force Grace to spend her last hours miserably? I'm not her judge, I'm her husband."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 41
"We won't die through playing fair with our guest. Let's keep our pride"
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 50
"Dad, you're a cold fish. Nothing excites you."
"So? I'm so excitable that I had to learn never to give into it."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 66
"'Willing discipline,' indeed!"
"In the long run, there is no other sort."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 68
"Duke, it is impossible to keep liquor away from any adult who is determined to have it. The United States Government wasn't that powerful."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 75
"It is impossible for anyone to be responsible for another person's behaviour. I spoke of myself as 'responsible' for this group, that was verbal shorthand. The most I can do -- or you, or any leader -- is to encourage each one to be responsible for himself."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 75
"Like this, Karen. The Cosmic Bomb hits us, dead on -- and kicks us into the next world. One exactly like the one we were in, except that it never had men in it."
[...]
"Let it be known as the Barbara Wells Theory Of Cosmic Transportation and stand adopted."
--Duke Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 79
"I mean you. I suspect you're a sissy about it."
"That's the way I was brought up, Hugh."
"So? I wasn't brought up this way either but I'm trying to make the best of it."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 80
"Why you utterly utter! I'm not flabby, I'm just deliciously padded."
--Karen Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 83
All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man. Book burners -- To rape a defenseless friendly book.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 83
"Look, Joe. They are a couple of clean, wholesome, evil-minded American girls. Say what you please, they will still believe you are sneaking a peak. It's part of their credo that they are so fatally irresistible that a man just has to."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 87
Now wait! He had steel bottles. There was strap iron in the bunks and soft iron in the periscope housing. Charcoal he could make and a bellows was simply an animal skin and some branches. Whittle a nozzle. Any damnfool who couldn't own a wheel with all that at his disposal deserved to lift and carry.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 87
He found that just digging was fun. Gave the mind a rest and the muscles a workout. Happy making. Hadn't tried it for much too long.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 88
"We didn't starve, but scraped icebox and dishrag soup were on the menu."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 90
"I won't listen to you beating your breast and sobbing 'Mea Culpa!' You don't take credit for Grace's virtues. Why take blame for her faults?"
--Barbara Wells, Farnham's Freehold, pg 91/92
"Hugh, you're counting your chickens before the cows come home."
--Joe, Farnham's Freehold, pg 95
"Ersatz 'dynamite.' And I don't need company. The stuff is so touchy that it explodes at a harsh look."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 103
"You are wondering why I hold church since I refuse to assert a creed?"
"Well . . . yes."
"It's my duty. Services should be available to those who need them. If there is no good and no God, this ritual is harmless. If God is, it is appropriate -- and still harmless."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 106
Games are important; they mark that we are not just animals trying to stay alive but humans enjoying life and savoring it.
--Barbara Wells, Farnham's Freehold, pg 107
"I wanted to be sure. Karen, you know that color does not matter to me. I want to know other things about man. Is his word good? Does he meet his obligations? Does he do honest work? Is he brave? Will he stand up and be counted? Joe is very much a man by all standards that interest me."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 115
"Please. You are reacting in terms of conventional morality, which is foolish."
"Oh? So morals are foolish are they? You hymn-singing hypocrite!"
"Morals are not foolish; morals must be our bedrock, always. But whether it was moral for Karen to breed a baby at another time and place, in a society that is no more, is irrelevant; we will not discuss it."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 118
"Oh, heaven! I like gardening. Pioneer mothers always worked when pregnant. They stopped when the pains came."
"And it killed them too."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 121
"Shouldn't we be boiling water?"
"Do so, if it will calm you. Duke, my O.B. kit, such as it is, has been ready for a month. There are six jars of boiled water, for this and that. Go kiss your sister and don't let her see that you're worried."
"You're a cold fish, Dad."
"Son, I'm scared silly. I can list thirteen major complications -- and I'm not prepared to cope with any of them. Mostly I pat her hand and tell her that everything is dandy -- and that's what she needs. I examine her, solemn as a judge, and don't know what to look for. It's just to reassure her . . . and I'll thank you to help out."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 131
"Stealing."
"I didn't figure it so. [...]"
"One man's stealing is another man's survival, I suppose."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 147
"You can have my razor, you can have my best knife. But snitch one book and I'll skin you alive and bind that book in human skin. There are limits."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 148
"It takes two to create a heaven . . . but hell can be accomplished by just one."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 148
"Your fault? Because a woman sick in her mind fixes on you to hate? You told me once not blame myself for another person's defect. You should take your own advice."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 149
Memtok's greatest objection to the Summer Palace was that it put him in contact with these servants who had the unpardonable fault of not being under his orders.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 162
(If it's true that I am your chattel, you arrogant bastard, I prefer being a valuable one!)
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 149
"Don't believe what they tell you about me while I'm gone -- regrettably it's all true."
--Memtok, Farnham's Freehold, pg 186
Alcohol, he reasoned, had the advantage of being a poison. It gave fair warning if one started drinking heavily.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 199
"It would be a good joke on Mrika if he found that he was going to have to raise the money to adopt fifteen hundred, two thousand servants -- or shut the house and live in a tent. I can just see that. Why, the lad can't take a pee without four servants to shake it."
--Ponse, Farnham's Freehold, pg 212
"I'm not foolish enough to hold opinions when I have insufficient data; I'll leave that folly to the scientists."
--Ponse, Farnham's Freehold, pg 220
"Then you know how much your condition has improved. Don't you sleep in a better bed now? Aren't you eating better? Uncle! When we picked you up you were half starved and infested with vermin. You were barely staying alive with the hardest sort of work, I could see. I'm not blind, I'm not stupid; there isn't a member of my Family down to the lowest cleaner that works half as hard as you had to, or sleeps in a poor bed -- and in a stinking little sty; I could hardly bear the stench before we fumigated it -- and as for food, if that is the word, any servant in this house would turn up his nose at what you ate. Isn't all that true?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"I prefer freedom."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 221
He was exactly like the members of every ruling class in history: honestly convinced of his benevolence and hurt if it was challenged.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 224/225
Surely Ponse was a gentleman within the accepted meaning of the term. he was conscientious about his responsibilities, generous and tolerant with his inferiors. A gentleman.
But he was a revolving son of a bitch, too! And Barbara ought not to be so ready to overlook the fact. Ignore it, yes -- one had to. But not forget it.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 229
"You'll live a long time, Uncle."
"Maybe. I've outlived a dozen food tasters, but that salts no fish."
--Ponse, Farnham's Freehold, pg 231
"The old man has lived a long time, he's not easy to kill."
"I can try!"
"So you can. If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgment."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 235
"I won't be a front for your evil suspicions. If it is to be done, you must have the guts to do it yourself."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 236
But he was sourly aware of something that Duke, in his delusions, apparently did not realize -- the oldest Law of the Conquered, that their women eventually submit -- willingly.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 236
"Death before dishonor!" was a slogan that did not wear well. In time it changed to happy cooperation.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 237
He tried to tell himself that no one is ever responsible for another person's actions. He believed it, he tried to live by it. But he found that cold wisdom no comfort.
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 244
Spilt milk butters no parsnips after the barn is burned so weep no more, my lady --
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 246
"I'll concede that Duke is happy. I'm well aware that if you feed a man enough of that Happiness drug, he'll be happy as a lark even if you cut off his arms and legs and then start on his head. But you can be that sort of 'happy' on morphine. Or heroin. Or opium. That doesn't make it a good thing. It's a tragedy."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 258
"I thought better of you, Joe. I thought you were a gentleman. It seems I was wrong."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 261
Go, go, go! With almost no equipment, a "nightshirt" for clothing, and no hope of anything better. Go! And save his family or die with them. But die free!
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 271
Would these docile sheep ever rebel? It seemed unlikely. he had been classed with them by accident of complexion but they were not truly of his breed. Centuries of selective breeding had made them as little like himself as a lap dog is like a timber wolf.
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 284
This matter of racial differences -- or the nonsense notion of "racial equality" -- had never been examined scientifically; there was too much raw emotion on both sides. Nobody wanted honest data.
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 285
Nevertheless, this confused matter of races would never be straightened out -- because almost nobody wanted the truth.
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 285
"Surprised, eh? But there is always an underground wherever there is a ruling class and a serving class. Which is to say always. If there were not one, it would be necessary to invent one."
--Ponse, Farnham's Freehold, pg 290
"I refuse to assume that we're going to die. I won't ever make that assumption again. All my figuring is based on the assumption that we are going to live. We go on. No matter what happens -- we go on."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 304
"Barbara, I can stand -- and somewhat understand but not forgive -- a straight out son of a bitch. But Ponse was, for my money, much worse. He had good intentions. He could always prove why the hotfoot he was giving you was for your own good. I despise him."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 310
"But these other things he knew were wrong. Because he tried to justify them. He rationalized slavery, he rationalized tyranny, he rationalized cruelty, and always wanted the victim to agree and thank him. The headsman expected to be tipped."
--Hugh Farnham, Farnham's Freehold, pg 311
"Bomb warning. Third bomb warning. This is not a drill. Take shelter at once. Any shelter, God damn it, you're going to be atom-bombed in the next few minutes. I'm damn well going to leave this goddamn microphone and dive for the basement myself when impact is five minutes away! So get the lead out, you stupid fools, and quit listening to this chatter! TAKE SHELTER!"
--Farnham's Freehold, pg 313
My old man taught me two things: "Mind own business" and "Always cut cards."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 7
Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you'll ever meet.
Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Buenos Aires, down Earthside, they've got a thinkum a tenth his size which can answer almost before you ask. But matters whether you get answer in microsecond rather than millisecond as long as correct?
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 7
Am not going to argue whether a machine can "really" be alive, "really" be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? I don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am. Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can't see it matters whether paths are protein
or platinum.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 8
"Mike, you want to discuss nature of humor. Are two types of jokes. One sort goes on being funny forever. Other sort is funny once. Second time it's dull. This joke is second sort. Use it once, you're a wit. Use twice, you're a halfwit."
"Geometrical progression?"
"Or worse."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis to Mike, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 12
This playful pocket of negative entropy . . .
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 8
Yapping had same significance as squeals of kittens in a box. Oh, some wardens listened and other wardens tried to suppress it but added up same either way -- null program.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 16
Tourist often remark on how polite everybody is in Luna -- with unstated comment that ex-prison shouldn't be so civilized. Having been Earthside and see what they put up with, I know what they mean. But useless to tell them we are what we are because bad actors don't live long -- in Luna.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 17
We are, eh? How? Everybody does business with Authority for same reason everybody does business with Law of Gravitation. Going to change that too?
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 19
A woman was ejected politely -- not politely on her part; she made coarse remarks about ejectors. I was embarrassed.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 19
One first thing learned about Luna, back with first shiploads of convicts, was that zero pressure was place for good manners. Bad-tempered straw boss didn't last many shifts; had an "accident" -- and top bosses learned not to pry into accidents or they met accidents too.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 20
"Wonderful" she had been, at swaying crowd. But oratory is null program.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 23
Three million, unarmed and helpless -- and eleven billion of them . . . with ships and bombs and weapons. We could be a nuisance -- but how long will papa take it before baby gets spanked?
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 23
As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 23
Comrades, harken to me! Every load you ship to Terra condemns your grandchildren to slow death. The miracle of photosynthesis, the plant-and-animal cycle, is a closed cycle. You have opened it -- and your lifeblood runs downhill to Terra.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 25
"If I ever marry again -- unlikely but I'm not opposed to it -- it would be just one man, a tight little marriage, earthworm style. Oh, I don't mean I would keep him dogged down. I don't think it matters where a man eats lunch as long as he comes home for dinner."
--Wyoming Knott, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 32
"But back to your plan, Wyoh: two things wrong. Never get 'solidarity'; blokes like Hauser would cave in -- because they are in a trap; can't hold out. Second place, suppose you managed it. Solidarity. So solid not a tonne of grain is delivered to catapult head. Forget ice; it's grain that makes Authority important and not just neutral agency it was set up to be. No grain. What happens?"
"Why they have to negotiate a fair price, that's what!"
"My dear, you and your comrades listen to each other too much. Authority would call it rebellion and warships would orbit with bombs earmarked for L-City and Hong Kong and Tycho Under and Churchill and Novylen, troops would land, grain barges would lift, under guard -- and farmers would break necks to cooperate. Terra has guns and power and bombs and ships and won't hold still for trouble from ex-cons.
"And troublemakers like you -- and me; with you in spirit -- us lousy troublemakers will be rounded up and eliminated, teach us a lesson. And earthworms would say we had it coming . . . because our side would never be heard. Not on Terra."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 35
"Revolutions have succeeded before. Lenin had only a handful with him."
"Lenin moved in on a power vacuum."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis to Wyoming Knott, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 35
"You're a pessimist."
"Nyet, realist. Never pessimist. Too much Loonie not to bet if any chance. Show me chances no worse than ten to one against and I'll go for broke. But want that one chance in ten."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis to Wyoming Knott, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 36
-- don't care when world ends long as I'm bathed and in clean clothes.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 36
" -- Manuel! Have you killed someone?"
"No, mum." (Breaking a man's jaw will not kill him.)
--The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 36
"Speaking of jokes -- do you have a sense of humor?"
"Certainly I have!" is what Wyoming did not answer -- and any other woman would as a locked-in program. She blinked thoughtfully and said, "You'll have to judge for yourself, cobber. I have something I use for one. It serves my simple purposes."
--The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 40
"Have you decided that I have a sense of humor?"
"Not sure. Why a minus on number seventeen?"
"Which one is that? [...] Why, any woman would have done the same! It's not funny, it's simply necessity." -Wyoming Knott to Manny, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 41
As kids say, Judge Lynch never sleeps.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 44
When a man dies, doesn't shock me too much; we get death sentences day we are born. But Mike was unique and no reason not to be immortal. Never mind "souls" -- prove Mike did not have one. And if no soul so much worse. No? Think twice.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 44
"Want you to meet somebody. Not-stupid."
"I knew you were not alone, Man; I can hear breathing. Will you please ask Not-stupid to move closer to the phone?
--Mike to Manny, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 46
"Girls are interesting, Mike; they can reach conclusions with even less data than you can."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 49
"Senorita, the day I let politics interfere with my appreciation of beauty, that day I retire from politics."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 54
"Manuel, the life of a conspirator is not an easy one and I learned before you were born not to mix provender and politics. Disturbs the gastric enzymes and leads to ulcers, the occupational disease of the underground."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 55
"And that, senorita, is the weakness of our Cause. Communications. Those goons were not important -- but crucially important is that it lay with the Warden, not with us, to decide whether the story should be told. To a revolutionist, communications are a sine-qua-non."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 58
" Terror! A man can face known danger. But the unknown frightens him. We disposed of those finks, teeth and toenails, to strike terror into their mates. Nor do I know how many effectives the Warden has, but I guarantee the are less effective today. Their mates went out on an easy mission. Nothing come back."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 58
"The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally. When the number is as high as four, chances are even that one is a spy."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 59
"Wyoming dear lady, revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coupe. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is a civil war, more violence, purges, terror. I hope you will forgive me if I say that, up to now, it has been done clumsily."
"What do you mean by 'correct organization'?"
"Functional organization. How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed -- and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design.
"So it is with revolution. Organization must be no larger than necessary -- never recruit anyone merely because he wants to join. Nor seek to persuade for the pleasure of having another share your views. He'll share them when the time comes . . . or you've misjudged the moment in history. Oh, there will be an educational organization but it must be separate; agitprop is no part of basic structure.
"As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy; therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal -- since there always are betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented.
"Much theory has gone into optimizing cell size. I think that history shows that a cell of three is best
-- more than three can't agree on when to have to have dinner, much less when to strike. Manuel, you belong to a large family; do you vote on when to have dinner?"
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 59-60
"For example, under what circumstance may the State justly place its welfare above that of a citizen?"
[...]
"Prof, as I see, are no circumstances in which State is justified in placing its welfare ahead of mine."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis to Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 64
"I'm a rational anarchist. [...] A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self- responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame . . . as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else . But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he
tried to live perfectly in an imperfect world . . . aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 64
Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 65
I had seen those luxuries Earthside. Wasn't worth what they put with. Don't mean heavy gravity, that doesn't bother them; I mean nonsense. All time kukai moa. If chicken guano in one earthworm city were shipped to Luna, fertilizer problem would be solved for century. Do this. Don't do that. Stay back of line. Where's tax receipt? Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up to pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead
-- but first get permit.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 65
Wyoh plowed doggedly into Prof, certain she had all answers. But Prof was interested in questions rather than answers, which baffled her.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 65
"Professor, I can't understand you. I don't insist that you call it 'government'
--I just want you to state what rules you think are necessary to insure equal freedom for all."
"Dear lady, I'll happily accept your rules."
"But you don't seem to want any rules!"
"True. But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
--Bernardo de la Paz to Wyoming Knott, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 65
"Prof, you know me. If kicking out Authority was thing we could buy, I wouldn't worry about price."
"' -- our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.'"
--Bernardo de la Paz to Manny, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 66
"Revolution is art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 66
"People do not realize how precarious our ecology is. Even so, it shocks me. I know water runs downhill . . . but didn't dream how terribly soon it would reach bottom."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 74
"A revolutionist must keep his mind free of worry or the pressure becomes intolerable."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 78
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 79
"Killing is not the way to handle a spy, not when he doesn't know that you know that he is a spy."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 80
But I was surprised that I had a record, too -- routine check made when I was cleared to work in Authority Complex. Was classed as "non-political" and someone had added "not too bright" which was both unkind and true or why would I get mixed up in revolution.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 81
"Never tease an old dog. He might still have one more bite."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 82
[Also quoted in Time Enough For Love, 3. --MN]
Prof and Mike shared childlike joy in intrigue for own sake. I suspect Prof enjoyed being rebel long before he worked out his political philosophy, while Mike -- how can human freedom matter to him? Revolution was a game -- a game that gave him companionship and chance to show off talents. Mike was as conceited a machine as you are ever likely to meet.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 82
Mike reasoned so: What is "war"? One book defined was as use of force to achieve political result. And "force" is action of one body on another applied by means of energy.
In war this is done by "weapons" -- Luna had none. But weapons, when Mike examined them as a class, turned out to be engines for manipulating energy -- and energy Luna has plenty. Solar flux alone is good for around one kilowatt per square meter of surface at Lunar noon; sunpower, though cyclic, is effectively unlimited. Hydrogen fusion power is almost as unlimited and cheaper, once ice is mined, magnetic pinchbottle set up. Luna has energy -- how to use?
But Luna also has energy of position; she sits at top of gravity well eleven kilometers per second deep and kept from falling in curb only two and a half km/s high. Mike knew that curb; daily he tossed grain frighters over it, let them slide downhill to Terra.
Mike had computed what would happen if a freighter grossing 100 tonnes (or same mass of rocks) falls to Terra, unbraked.
Kinetic energy as it hits is 6.25 X 10^12 joules -- over six trillion joules.
This converts in a split second to heat. Explosion, big one!
Should have been obvious. Look at Luna: What do you see? Thousands and thousands of craters -- places where Somebody got playful throwing rocks.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 83
But Mum always went -- ritual not religions, for she admitted to me one night in pillow talk that she had no religion with a brand on it, then cautioned me not to tell Greg. I exacted same caution from her. I don't know Who is cranking; I'm pleased He doesn't stop.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 86
"I think every Loonie dreams of the day when we will be free. All but some poor spineless rats."
--Mama Mimi, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 90
Our first purpose was not to be noticed. Long distance purpose was to make thing as much worse as possible.
Yes, worse. Never was a time, even at last, when all Loonies wanted to throw off Authority, wanted it bad enough to revolt. All Loonies despised Warden and cheated Authority. Didn't mean they were ready to fight and die.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 91
As Prof says, a society adapts to fact, or doesn't survive. Loonies adapted to harsh facts -- or failed and died. But "patriotism" was not necessary to survival.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 92
I began to learn techniques of conspiracy and to appreciate Prof's feeling that revolution could be an art. Did not forget (nor ever doubt) Mike's predictions that Luna was only seven years from disaster. But did not think about it, thought about fascinating, finicky details.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 96 (continued in quote below)
Prof had emphasized that stickiest problems in conspiracy are communications and security, and had pointed out that they conflict -- easier are communications, greater is risk to security; if security is tight, organization can be paralyzed by safety precautions.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 96 (continued from quote above)
"That's barbaric. And unfair."
"Mike, almost everything is unfair. What can't be cured -- "
" -- must be endured. That's a funny once, Man."
--Holmes to Manny, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 103
. . . unknown to me but known to Prof and latent in Mike's immense knowledge, that most money is simply bookkeeping.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 107
I can't describe jiggery-pokery Mike used to balance his books while keeping thousands of thefts from showing. But bear in mind that an auditor must assume that machines are honest. He will make test runs to check that machines are working correctly -- but it will not occur to him that tests prove nothing because machine itself is dishonest.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 108
I told conscience to go to sleep. Was pipsqueak compared to swindles by every government throughout history in financing every war -- and is not revolution war?
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 108
Since Mike ran everything, was not corrupted by tinge of honesty.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 108
When Mike started writing poetry I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He wanted to publish it! Shows how thoroughly humanity had corrupted this innocent machine that he should wish to see his name in print.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 118
If you go judge, better in good neighborhood with solid citizens.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 127
"'Tone-stapple,' or something like it."
"Oh. 'Tanstaafl.' Means 'there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.' And isn't or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless."
"An interesting philosophy."
"Not philosophy, fact. One way or other what you get you pay for."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis to Stuart LaJoie, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 129
"Was Earthside once and heard expression 'Free as air.' This air isn't free, you pay for every breath."
"Really? No one has asked me to pay to breathe. Perhaps I should stop."
"Can happen, you almost breathed vacuum tonight. But nobody asks you because you've paid. For you, is part of round-trip ticket; for me is quarterly charge. But we both pay."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis to Stuart LaJoie, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 129
An earthworm expects to find a law, a printed law, for every circumstance. Even have laws for private matters such as contracts. Really. If a man's word isn't any good, who would contract with him.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 130
As automatic as gravitation. Those who adjust to facts stay alive; those who don't are dead and no problem.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 131
"All our customs work that way. If you're out in field and cobber needs air, you lend him a bottle and don't ask cash. But when you're both back in pressure again. If he won't pay up, nobody would criticize if you eliminated him without a judge. But he would pay; air is almost as sacred as women. If you take a new chum in a poker game, you give him air money. Not eating money; can work or starve."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 132
Stu offered own fortune and Prof did not discourage it -- Where treasure is, heart will be.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 139
Prof claimed that communication to enemy were essential to any war if was to be fought and settled sensibly. (Prof was a pacifist. Like his vegetarianism, he did not let it keep him from being rational.)
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 139
"But, Man, it increases risk. That it is necessary risk does not change the fact that risk is increased."
--Mike (Mycroft Holmes IV), The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 139
. . . and I suspect that his was distrust of all machinery; was sort of person who finds anything more involved than a pair of scissors complex, mysterious, and suspect -- Stone Age mind.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 140
Like a perfect dinner, a revolution has to "cooked" so that everything comes out even.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 141
My dinkum word, preparing a revolution isn't as much huhu as having won it.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 146
Turned out Warden was not dead, nor had we planned to kill him; Prof figured that a live warden could always be made dead, whereas a dead one could not be made live if we needed him.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 147
Finn decided that shooting was too good for them, so he went judge and used his squad as jury.
They were stripped, hamstrung at ankles and wrists, turned over to women in Complex. Makes me sick to think about what happened next but don't suppose they lived through as long an ordeal as Marie Lyons endured. Women are amazing creatures -- sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 148
. . . a typical babu, polite and faintly scornful.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 151
Dodge we had in mind would not work well Earthside; a laser beam carrying heavy power works best in vacuum -- but there it works just dandy for whatever range its collimation is good for. These big drills, which had carved through rock seeking pockets of ice, were now being mounted as "artillery" to repel space attacks. Both ships and missiles have electronic systems and does electronic gear no good to blast it with umpteen joules in a tight beam. If target is pressurized (as manned ships are and most missiles), all it takes it to burn a hole, depressure it. If not pressured, a heavy laser beam can still kill it -- burn eyes, louse guidance, spoil anything depending on electronics as most everything does.
An H-bomb with circuitry ruined is not a bomb, is just big tub of lithium deuteride that can't do anything but crash. A ship with eyes gone is a derelict, not a warship.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 158
Belittlers kept opinions to selves after that. Prof thought we ought to send out a gentle warning not to eliminate so peremptorily. I opposed it and got my way; could see no better way to improve breed. Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 159
Throw away every book, table, instrument, and start over? I know that some of my ancestors did that in switching from old English to MKS -- but they did it to make things easier. Fourteen inches to a foot and some odd number of feet to a mile. Ounces and pounds. Oh, Bog!
Made sense to change that -- but why go out of your way to create confusion?
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 160
Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws -- always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I
know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" -- not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 161
"Manuel, do you really think that mob of retarded children can pass any laws?"
"You told them to. Urged them to."
"My dear Manuel, I was simply putting all my nuts in one basket. I know those nuts; I've listened to them for years.
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 162
" . . . more than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better -- and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest. Never fear, son, this Ad-Hoc Congress will do nothing . . . of if they do pass something through sheer fatigue, it will be so loaded with contradictions that it will have to be thrown out."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh
Mistress, pg 162
That choom was almost sensible, merely a literary critic, which is harmless, like dead yeast left in beer.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 164
I was in bad shape and not just high gee; could do well enough in a wheelchair and could even walk a little although did not in public. What I had was a sore throat that missed pneumonia only through drugs, traveler's trots, skin disease on hands and spreading to feet -- just like my other trips to disease-ridden hole, Terra.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 178
. . . Luna did not feed "a hundred million Hindus" -- unless you chose to think of our grain as making difference between malnutrition and starvation.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 185
Hard to coerce a man who faints if he gets overexcited.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 186
Stu could lie standing up almost as well as Prof. Me, I have to think out a lie ahead of time.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 190
"A technicality. Sir, there was a time when it was not simply expensive to ship goods across oceans but impossible. Then it was expensive, difficult, dangerous. Today you sell goods half around your planet almost as cheaply as next door; long-distance shipping is the least important factor in cost."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 192
"Gentlemen, I am not an engineer. But I have learned this about engineers. When something must be done, engineers can find a way that is economically feasible."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 192
"Never mind financial aspects. Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds."
--Dr. Chan, Lunar Authority, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 197
. . . Luna has only one way to deal with a new chum: Either he makes not one fatal mistake, in personal behaviour or in coping with environment that will bite without warning . . . or he winds up as fertilizer in tunnel farm.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 201
"Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 202
"Or, when you don't know what a man is getting at, let our counter-question shift the subject to something you do want to talk about. Then, no matter what he answers, make your point and call on someone else. Logic does not enter into it -- just tactics."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 205
"A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers ... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible.'"
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 205
"Manuel, on some subjects I don't trust myself."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 205
"Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.'"
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 205
"This planet isn't crowed; it is just mismanaged . . . and the unkindest thing you can do for a hungry man is to give him food. 'Give.' Read Malthus. It is never safe to laugh at Dr. Malthus; he always has the last laugh. A depressing man, I'm glad he's dead."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 206
"But you have no talent for dishonesty, so your refuge must be ignorance and stubbornness. You have the latter; try to preserve the former."
--Bernardo de la Paz to Manny, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 206
If we ever managed to leave, price to lift that mass to Luna would hurt -- I was resigned to abandoning a p-suit with years more wear in it -- abandon everything but two left arms and a pair of shorts. If pressed, might give up social arm. If very pressed, would skip shorts.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 206
Suppose I waxed too enthusiastic -- but my family is most important thing in my life. Without them I'm just a one-armed mechanic who could be eliminated without causing a draft.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 209
"They arise, as marriage customs always do, from economical necessities of the circumstances -- and our circumstances are very different from those here on Earth. Take the line type of marriage which my colleague has been praising . . . and justifiably, I assure you, despite his personal bias
--I am a bachelor and have no bias. Line marriage is the strongest possible device for conserving capital and insuring the welfare of children -- the two most basic societal functions for marriage
everywhere -- in an environment in which there is no security, neither for capital nor for children, other than that devised by individuals. Line marriage is a remarkably successful invention to that end."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 210
Stu's operators had gone to much thought to plan setup to get me arrested. Was not told until weeks later after time to cool off and see benefits. Took a stupid judge, a dishonest sheriff, and barbaric local prejudices which I triggered with that sweet picture, for Stu admitted later that range of color in Davis family was what got judge angry enough to be foolish beyond even native talent for nonsense.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 211
"How you feel, Prof?"
"Okay. A bit tired. Frustrated."
"Ja. Da. Frustrated."
"Over not seeing the Taj Mahal, I mean. I never had an opportunity as a young man -- and here I've been within a kilometer of it twice, once for several days, now for another day . . . and I still haven't seen it and never shall."
"Just a tomb."
"And Helen of Troy was just a woman."
--Bernardo de la Paz to Manny, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 218
"Think we ought to rouse Prof?"
"Let him sleep. Can you think of a better way to make the jump than from peaceful sleep instantaneously into a cloud of radiant gas?"
--Stuart LaJoie, to Manny, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 220
"Since they can inflict their will upon us, our only chance lies in weakening their will. That was why we had to go to Terra. To be divisive. To create many opinions. The shrewdest of the great generals in China's history once said that perfection in war lay in so sapping the opponents will that he surrenders without fighting. In that maxim lies both our ultimate purpose and our most pressing danger."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 22
Look . . . I knew we couldn't whip Terra -- I'm tech by trade and know that an H-missile doesn't care how brave you are.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 226
"Manuel, I don't think the situation is as bad as you seem to feel that it is. In each age it is necessary to adapt to the popular mythology. At one time kings were anointed by Diety, so the problem was to see to it that Diety anointed the right candidate. In this age the myth is 'the will of the people'... but the problem only changes superficially."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 227
If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 229
I don't know how much to tell. Can't tell all, but stuff in history books is so wrong!
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 237
Revolution is an amateur thing for almost everybody; . . .
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 237
But is no limit to how big a fusion bomb can be; F.N. could build one big enough to smash L-City -- or theoretically even a doomsday job that would split Luna like a melon and finish job some asteroid started at Tycho. If they did, couldn't see anyway to stop them, so didn't worry.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 237
"Comrade members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 240
"Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional ... for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 241
"You might even consider installing the candidates who receive the least number of votes; unpopular men may be just the sort to save you from a new tyranny. Don't reject the idea merely because it seems preposterous -- think about it! In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes worse than overt tyrannies."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 241
" -- the more impediment to legislation the better."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 242
"But in writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies ... no interference however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation ... no involuntary taxation. Comrades, if you were to spend five years in a study of history while thinking of more and more things that your government should promise never to do and then let your constitution be nothing but those negatives, I would not fear the outcome.
"What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well- intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing. Please remember always that the Lunar Authority was created for the noblest of purposes by just such sober and well-intentioned men, all popularly elected. And with that thought I leave you to your labors. Thank you."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 242
"But if you really believe that your neighbors must have laws for their own good, why shouldn't you pay for it? Comrades, I beg you -- do not resort to compulsory taxation. There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 242
"You have put your finger on the dilemma of all government -- and the reason I am an anarchist. The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 243
"It may not be possible to do away with government -- sometimes I think government is an inescapable disease of human beings."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 243
"Still doesn't say how to pay for what we are doing now."
"'How,' Manuel? you know how we are doing it. We're stealing it. I'm neither proud of it nor ashamed; it's the means we have. If they ever catch on, they may eliminate us -- and that I am prepared to face. At least in stealing we have not created the villainous precedent of taxation."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 243
"Listen, you upstart collection of semi-conductors, you are merely a minister-without-portfolio while I am Minister of Defense. I ought to see what's going on and I have exactly two eyeballs while you've got eyes spread over half of Crisium. You trying to hog fun?"
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis to Mike, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 253
Spaceships aren't build for no purpose -- too expensive.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 262
It [the "body" of Adam Selene] lay in State in Old Dome with face covered, and was speech-making I didn't listen to -- Mike didn't miss a word; his most human quality was his conceit.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 263
Like all Loonies, we conserve our dead -- and am truly glad that barbaric custom of burial was left back on Old Earth; our way is better. But Davis family does not put that which comes out of processor into our commercial farming tunnels. No, it goes into our little greenhouse tunnel, there to become roses and daffodils and peonies among soft-singing bees. Tradition says that Black Jack Davis is in there, or whatever atoms of him do remain after many, many, many years of blooming.
Is a happy place, a beautiful place.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 264
-- only thing I was sure of was that Dr. Chan would not himself sit on a target. But he might not warn his old mother.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 264
As Prof says, "If possible, leave room for your enemy to become your friend."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 266
Prof's purpose was to short him out -- but sometimes Prof is too subtle; some people talk better if they breathe vacuum.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 272
"Oh. Did your brainy friends tell you what happens when you release a few billion calories in split second all at one spot? What temperature? How much radiance? [...] Hit anything hard enough, strike sparks. Elementary physics, known to everybody but intelligentsia. We just struck damnest big sparks ever made by human agency, is all. Big flash. Heat, light, ultraviolet. Might even produce X-rays, couldn't say. Gamma radiation I strongly doubt. Alpha and Beta, impossible. Was sudden
release of mechanical energy. But nuclear? Nonsense!"
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 274
Wright had been correct in saying that "thousands of lives" had been lost; news up from Earthside was full of it. How many we'll never know; if a person stands at ground zero and tonnes of rock land on him, isn't much left.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 278
Greatest shortcoming of computers isn't computer shortcoming at all but fact that a human takes a long time, maybe hours, to set up a program the computer solves in milliseconds.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 278
"Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 290
"Would be nice if Great China busted alliance against us; might save us some damage. But we've got this far only by appearing able to hit them at will and to destroy any ship they send against us. At least I hope that last one was burned and we've certainly clobbered eight of nine. We won't get anywhere by looking weak, not while F.N. is claiming that we are not just weak but finished. Instead we must hand them surprises. Starting with Great China and if it makes Dr. Chan unhappy, we'll
give him a kerchief to weep into."
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 294
"There was a time, two centuries ago, when dirty laundry used to be shipped to from California to Hawaii -- by sailing ship, mind you -- and clean laundry returned. Special circumstances. If we ever see water and manure shipped to Luna and grain shipped back, it be just as temporary. Luna's future lies in her unique position at the top of a gravity well over a rich planet, and in her cheap power and plentiful real estate. If we Loonies have sense enough in the centuries ahead to remain a
free port and to stay out of entangling alliances, we will become the crossroads for two planets, three planets, the entire solar system. We won't be farmers forever."
--Bernardo de la Paz, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 298
Can a machine be so frightened and hurt that it will go into catatonia and refuse to respond? While ego crouches inside, aware but never willing to risk it?
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 301
But Prof underrated yammerheads. They never adopted any of his ideas. Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden. Prof got fascinated by possibilities for shaping future that lay in a big smart computer -- and lost track of things closer to home. Oh, I backed him! But now I wonder. Are food riots too high a price to pay to let people be? I don't know.
--Manuel Kelly Garcia Davis, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, pg 301
Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 3
"Hnh! 'This man Smith -- ' This 'Man!' Can't you see that he is not?"
"Eh?"
"Smith . . . is . . . not . . . a . . . man."
"Huh? Explain yourself, Captain."
"Smith is an intelligent creature with the ancestry of a man, but he is more Martian than man. Until we came along he had never laid eyes on a man. He thinks like a Martian, feels like a Martian. He's been brought up by a race which has nothing in common with us -- they don't even have sex. He's a man by ancestry, a Martian by environment. If you want to drive him crazy and waste that treasure trove,' call in your fat-headed professors. Don't give him a chance to get used to this
madhouse planet. It's no skin off me; I've done my job."
--Captain Van Tromp, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 7
"Sir, talking with a Martian is like talking with an echo. You don't get argument but you don't get results."
--Captain Van Tromp, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 7
"What's the idea of these orders about 'Absolutely No Women'? Is he a sex machine?"
"All I know is they brought him from the Champion and said he was to have absolute quiet."
"'The Champion! That accounts for it."
"Accounts for what?"
"It stands to reason. He ain't had any, he ain't seen any, he ain't touched any -- for months. And he's sick, see? If he was to lay hands on any, they're afraid he'd kill himself. I bet I would."
--conversation between an intern and Marine guards, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 10
" -- although he talked in the oddest fashion and asked the darnedest questions."
"It would be odder still if he hadn't talked oddly. [...] Jill, we don't know much about Mars but we do know that Martians are not human. Suppose you were popped into a tribe so far back in the jungle that they had never seen shoes. Would you know the small talk that comes from a lifetime in a culture? That's mild analogy; the truth is at least forty million miles stranger."
--Ben Caxton to Gillian Boardman, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 22
"But, Ben, to protect him from infection doesn't take armed guards."
--Gillian Boardman, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 23
"Jill, you know the famous case of General Atomics versus Larkin, et al?"
"You mean the Larkin Decision. I had it in school, same as everybody. What's it got to do with Smith?"
"Think back. The Russians sent the first ship to the Moon, it crashed. The United States and Canada combine to send one; it gets back but leaves nobody on the Moon. So while the United States and the Commonwealth are getting set to send a colonizing one under the sponsorship of the Federation and Russia is mounting the same deal on their own, General Atomics steals a march by boosting one from an Island leased from Ecuador -- and their men are there, sitting pretty and looking smug when the Federation vessel shows up -- followed by the Russian one.
"So General Atomics, a Swiss Corporation American controlled, claimed the Moon. The Federation couldn't brush them off and grab it; the Russians would never have held still. So the High Court ruled that a corporate person, a mere legal fiction, could not own a planet; the real owners were the men who maintained occupation -- Larkin and associates. So they recognized them as a sovereign nation and took them into the Federation -- with melon slicing for those on the inside and concessions to General Atomics and its daughter corporation, Lunar Enterprises. This did not please anybody and the Federation Court was not all-powerful then, but it was a compromise everybody could swallow. It resulted in rules for colonizing planets, all based on the Larkin Decision and intended to avoid bloodshed. Worked too -- World War Three did not result from conflict over space travel and such. So the Larkin Decision is law and applies to Smith.
"I don't see the connection."
"Think, Jill. By our laws, Smith is a sovereign nation -- and sole owner of the planet Mars."
--Ben Caxton to Gillian Boardman, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 26
"I don't pay attention to politics."
"You should. It's barely less important than your heartbeat."
"I don't pay attention to that, either."
--Gillian Boardman to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 28
Everyone knows that jails and hospitals have one thing in common: They can be very hard to get out of. In some ways a prisoner is less cut off than a patient; a prisoner can send for his lawyer, demand a Fair Witness, invoke habeas corpus and require the jailor to show cause in open court.
But it takes only a NO VISITORS sign, ordered by one of the medicine me of our peculiar tribe, to consign a hospital patient to oblivion more thoroughly than ever was the Man in the Iron Mask.
--Ben Caxton in his column on the Man From Mars, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 31
"I am only an egg."
--Dr. Nelson translating a Martian greeting used by Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 34
"I don't know that my apartment is bugged -- but if I can do it to them, they can do it to me. Likewise, while it isn't likely that a cab signaled from my flat would have an ear in it, still it might have; the Special Service squads are thorough."
--Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 35
"Jill, a government is a living organism. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is the instinct to survive. You hit it, it fights back."
--Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 35
"That's a good question. If there are no other questions, the class is dismissed."
--Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 36
"The Larkin decision might not apply. Luna was uninhabited, but Mars is -- by Martians. At the moment, Martians are a legal zero. But the High Court might take a look at the political situation and decide that human occupancy meant nothing on a planet inhabited by non-humans. Then rights on Mars would have to be secured from the Martians."
"But, Ben, that would be the case anyhow. This notion of a single man owning a planet . . . it's fantastic!"
"Don't use that word to a lawyer; straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in law schools. Besides, there is precedent. In the fifteenth century the Pope deeded the western hemisphere to Spain and Portugal and nobody cared that the real estate was occupied by Indians with their own laws, customs, and property rights. His grant was effective, too. Look at a map and notice where Spanish is spoken and where Portuguese is spoken."
"Yes, but -- Ben, this isn't the fifteenth century."
"It is to a lawyer."
--Ben Caxton to Gillian Boardman, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 36
"Ben, why should anyone want that much power?"
"Why does a moth fly toward light?"
--Ben Caxton to Gillian Boardman, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 36/37
"Pish and likewise tush! When I was on the General Synthetics scandals I never slept twice in one place and ate nothing but packaged food. You get to like it -- it stimulates the metabolism."
--Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 38
Ben Caxton wondered who had written it. Jim Sanforth, probably -- Jim had the slickest touch of any of Douglas's staff in selecting loaded adjectives to tickle and soothe; he had written commercials before he went into politics and had no compunctions. Yes, that bit about "the hand that rocks the cradle" was Jim's work -- Jim was the type who would entice a young girl with candy.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 39
There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk "his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" on an outcome dubious.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 56
The Man from Mars sat down when Jill left. He did not pick up the picture book but simply waited in a fashion which may be described as "patient" only because human language does not embrace Martian attitudes. He held still with quiet happiness because his brother had said that he would return. He was prepared to wait, without moving, without doing anything, for several years.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 56
"You can talk now."
"What should I say?"
"Huh? Whatever you like."
"May our eggs share the same nest."
--conversation between Gillian Boardman and Valentine Michael Smith after she helped him escape from the hospital, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 59
It occurred to him [Valentine Michael Smith] that the apportation used at home did not permit this delightful viewing of what lay between. This almost led him to a comparison of Martian and human methods not favorable to the Old Ones, but his mind shied away from heresy.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 56
He resolved to enfold and praise it, an effort like that of a human trying to appreciate the merits of cannibalism --
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 62
Half the time talking to him [Valentine Michael Smith] was like shouting down a rain barrel.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 63
He grokked that this was one of the critical cusps in the growth of a being wherein contemplation must bring forth right action in order to permit further growth.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 67
"Scientists indeed! Half guess work and half superstition. They ought to be locked up; they ought to be prohibited by law. Joseph, I've told you repeatedly, the only true science is astrology."
--Alice Douglas, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 74
Becky Vesey (as she had been known) had never really mastered multiplication tables and was inclined to confuse sevens with nines.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 77
. . . Jubal E. Harshaw, LL.B, M.D., Sc.D., bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite, popular author extraordinary, and neo-pessimist philosopher . . .
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 81
Harshaw was working hard. Most of him was watching pretty girls do pretty things with sun and water; one small, shuttered, soundproofed compartment was composing. He claimed that his method of writing was to hook his gonads in parallel with his thalamus and disconnect his cerebrum; his habits lent credibility to the theory.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 81
"Boss!"
"Yes, Larry?"
"There's a dame down here at the gate -- and she's got a corpse with her."
"Is she pretty?"
"Uh . . . yes."
"Then why are you sucking your thumb? Let her in."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 82
[On the occasion of Gillian Boardman's arrival with Valentine Michael Smith in a Martian trance]
"Larry, is the fence hot?"
"No."
"Switch it on. Then polish every fingerprint off that heap. When it gets dark, drive over the other side of Reading -- better go almost to Lancaster -- and leave it in a ditch. Then go to Philadelphia, catch the Scranton shuttle, come home from there."
"Sure thing, Jubal. Say -- is he really the Man from Mars?"
"Better hope not. If he is and they catch you before you dump the wagon and connect you with him they'll quiz you with a blow torch. I think he is."
"I scan it. Should I rob a bank on the way back?"
"Probably the safest thing you can do."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 84
"Here's to our noble selves! There are damned few of us left."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 85
[A toast offered by Jubal, and probably based on the Scottish toast entered as 5-16 in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. --MN]
"Are you in love with him [Valentine Michael Smith]?"
"Why, that's preposterous!"
"Not at all. You're a girl; he's a boy -- that's a nice set up."
--Jubal Harshaw to Gillian Boardman, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 86
"Now, our patient: you said you wanted him to go get his 'rights.' You expected my help?"
"Well . . . Ben said -- Ben seemed to think you would help."
"Ben does not speak for me. I am not interested in this lad's so-called rights. His claim to Mars is lawyer's hogwash; as a lawyer myself I need not respect it. As for the wealth that is supposed to be his, the situation results from other people's passions and our odd tribal customs; he has earned none of it. he would be lucky if they bilked him of it -- but I would not scan a newspaper to find out. If Ben expected me to fight for Smith's 'rights' you have come to the wrong house."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 86/87
"My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity ... and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases Jubal Harshaw."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 87
In most of a century of gutsy living he [Jubal Harshaw] had been broke many times, had often been wealthier than he now was; he regarded both as shifts in the weather and never counted his change.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 88/89
He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; most people were candidates for protective restraint.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 89
His snap opinion was that Smith was legally insane and medically psychopathic by normal standards, the victim of a double-barreled situation psychosis of unique and monumental extent, first from being raised by non-humans and second from being pitched into another alien society.
But he regarded both the legal notion of sanity and the medical notion of psychosis as irrelevant.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 90
On the fourth pebble the ancient Martians were not disturbed by contact with Earth. Nymphs bounced joyously around the surface, learning to live and eight out of nine dying in the process. Adult Martians, enormously different in body and mind from nymphs, huddled in faerie, graceful cities and were as quiet as nymphs were boisterous -- yet were even busier and led a rich life of the mind.
Adults were not free of work in the human sense; they had a planet to supervise; plants must be told when and where to grow, nymphs who had passed 'prenticeships by surviving must be gathered in, cherished, fertilized; the resultant eggs must be cherished and contemplated to encourage them to ripen properly, fulfilled nymphs must be persuaded to give up childish things and metamorphosed into adults. All these must be done -- but they were no more the "life" of Mars than is walking the dog
twice a day the "life" of a man who bosses a planet-wide corporation between those walks -- even though to a being from Arcturus III those walks might seem to be the tycoon's most significant activity -- as a slave to the dog.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 91
Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 92
Shortly before, around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treastise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned. The important point was that the artist had
accidentally discorporated before he finished his masterpiece.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 92
The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 93
His Martian keeper and his keeper's water brothers had not mocked him with things he could not grasp.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 93
Harshaw had the arrogant humility of a man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance; he saw no point in "measurements" when he did not know what he was measuring.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 95
Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling -- oh, Harshaw conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good."
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 95
Jubal breathed malediction against all gods involved in the follies of the human race, . . .
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 96
"Use your head, Gillian. Just because a package says 'Cigarettes' does not prove it contains cigarettes."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 97
"Remind me to write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 98
"The worst that can happen to him is death . . . and that we all are in for -- in days, or weeks, or years."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 99
"A capacity for enjoying the inevitable -- why I've been cultivating that all my life . . . but this infant, barely old enough to vote and too unsophisticated to stand clear of the horse cars, has me convinced that I've just reached kindergarten. Jill, you asked if Mike was welcome. Child, I want to keep that boy until I've found out what he knows and I don't! This 'discorporation' thing . . . it's not the Freudian 'death wish' -- none of that 'Even the weariest river' stuff -- it's more
like Stevenson's 'Glad did I live and gladly die and I lay me down with a will!' I suspect that Stevenson was whistling in the dark or enjoying the euphoria of consumption, but Mike has me halfway convinced that knows what he is talking about."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 99
"Softly, Jill. Kidnapped is a dirty word."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 103
"My dear, it is not a crime to be present at a miracle. Nor to work one."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 103
[Note: One should keep in mind that the sort of crime to which Jubal alluded was legislated statutes. One of the themes of SIASL is that miracles are always a religious crime, unless they are of your religion. --MN]
"It makes no never-mind whether you kids wear skin or overcoats. Chase him out."
"Please, Jubal. He's got to learn."
"Humph! You're forcing on him you own narrow-minded, middle-class, Bible Belt morality."
"I am not! I'm simply teaching him necessary customs."
"Customs, morals -- is there a difference? Woman, here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe -- and you want to turn him into a copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why not go whole hog? Get him a briefcase."
"I'm not doing anything of the sort! I'm just trying to keep him out of trouble. It's for his own good."
"That's the excuse they gave the tomcat before his operation."
--Jubal Harshaw to Gillian Boardman, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 104/105
"Sit down -- and quit trying to be as nasty as I am; you don't have my years of practise."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 105
"Now let's get something straight: you are not in my debt. Impossible -- because I never do anything I don't want to. Nor does anyone, but in my case I know it."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 105
"Gratitude' is a euphemism for resentment. Resentment from most people I do not mind -- but from pretty little girls it is distasteful."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 105
(see To Sail Beyond The Sunset, 260; also see the following quote)
"Why, Jubal, I don't resent you -- that's silly."
"I hope you don't . . . but you will if you don't root out of your mind this delusion that you are indebted to me. The Japanese have five ways to say 'thank you' -- and every one translates as resentment, in various degrees. Would that English had the same built-in honesty! Instead, English can define sentiments that the human nervous system is incapable of experiencing. 'Gratitude' for example."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 105
"I do not grok all fullness of what I read. In the history written by Master William Shakespeare I found myself full of happiness at the death of Romeo. Then I read on and learned that he had discorporated too soon -- or so I thought I grokked. Why?"
"He was a blithering young idiot."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 105
Harshaw stopped to remind himself that this baby innocent was neither babyish nor innocent -- was in fact sophisticated in a culture which he was beginning to realize was far in advance of human culture in mysterious ways . . . and that these naive remarks came from a superman -- or what would do for a "superman."
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 118
"Nobody under my roof refuses to eat at my table because he won't eat with others who eat there. I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman -- which means I can be a cast-iron son of bitch when it suits me. It suits me right now . . . which is to say that no ignorant, superstitious, prejudiced bumpkin is permitted to tell me who is fit to eat at my table. I dine with publicans and sinners, that is my business. I do not break bread with Pharisees."
--Jubal Harshaw,
Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 120
[The phrase: son of bitch is entered as written in the book. --MN]
"It is not nonsense and nobody asked you; you aren't competent to have an opinion."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 121
"Duke, I believe in everyone's working out his own damnation but that is no excuse to give a dynamite cap to baby."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 121
"A poisonous snake is not dangerous, no more than a loaded gun is dangerous -- in each case you must handle it properly. The thing that made that snake dangerous was that I hadn't know what it could do. If, in my ignorance, I had handled it carelessly, it would have killed me as casually and innocently as a kitten scratches."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 122
"Oh, I don't go to church much, but I was brought up right. I've got faith."
"Good. Though I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith -- it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe. However, since you believe in immortality, we need not trouble over the probability that your prejudices will cause your demise. Do you want to be cremated or buried?"
--Jubal Harshaw lecturing Duke on the danger of his prejudices,
Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 123
"Try believing the evidence instead of insisting that the cameras must be at fault because what they saw was not what you expected."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 125
"Sure, about most things it's just Mike's hard luck that he wasn't brought up civilized. But this is different, this is an instinct."
"'Instinct,' Dreck!"
--Jubal Harshaw responding to Duke's misconceptions, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 125
"Shucks, son, it couldn't be instinct; cannibalism is historically a most widespread custom in every branch of the human race. Your ancestors, my ancestors, everybody."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 126
"Duke, it's silly to talk about a practice being 'against instinct' when hundred of millions have followed it."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 126
"Mike is utterly civilized, Martian style."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 127
Harshaw disdained to surround himself with flappers suitable to his own rank -- he answered his telephone himself if he happened to be at hand because each call offered odds that he could be rude to some stranger for daring to invade his privacy without cause -- cause by Harshaw's definition.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 130
"All morning I have been trying to make a simple phone call -- and I have been passed from one butter-fly brained bovine to another, every one of them feeding out of the public trough. And now you."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 132
"I don't propose to be fobbed off on some junior assistant flunky without the authority to blow his own nose!"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 133
Harshaw felt that certain feet were made for stepping on, in order to improve the breed, promote the general welfare, and minimize the ancient intolerance of office; he has seen at once that Heinrich had such feet.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 134
What statute was violated in turning a man ninety degrees from everything else?
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 136
Harshaw recalled the tragedy that relativity had been for many scientists. Their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was die and let younger minds take over.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 136
"Something on your mind, son?"
"About what I was seeing in that goddamn-noisy-box. You said, 'But talk to me later.'"
"Oh. Yes, but don't call that thing a 'goddamn noisy box.' It is a stereovision receiver."
"It is not a goddamn-noisy-box? I heard you not rightly?"
"It is indeed a goddamn noisy box. But you must call it a stereovision receiver."
--Jubal Harshaw and Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 136/137
The universe was a silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings "just happened" to be atoms that "just happened" to get together in ways which "just happened" to look like consistent laws and some configurations "just happened" to possess self-awareness and that two "just happened" to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange
Land, pg 138
Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe -- random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not contain itself.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 139
The Fosterites might be right.
But, he reminded himself savagely, two things remained; his taste and his pride. If the Fosterites held a monopoly on Truth, if Heaven were open only to Fosterites, then he, Jubal Harshaw, gentleman, preferred that eternity of painfilled damnation promised to "sinners" who refused the New Revelation. He could not see the naked Face of God ... but his eyesight was good enough to pick out his social equals -- and those Fosterites did not measure up!
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange
Land, pg 139
-- Mike did not grasp the idea of Creation. Well, Jubal wasn't sure that he did, either -- long ago he had made a pact with himself to postulate a created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days -- since each hypothesis, whole paradoxical, avoided the paradoxes of the other -- with a day off each leap year for sheer solipsist debauchery. Having tabled an unanswerable question he had given no thought to it for a generation.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 140
"Jubal . . . I think I grok that my people -- 'Martians' -- are man. Not shape. Shape is not man. Man is grokking. I speak rightly?"
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 142
Yet the boy was right; shape was irrelevant in defining "Man," as unimportant as the bottle containing the wine.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 142
Man's self-awareness? Sheer conceit, there was no way to prove that sperm whales or sequoias were not philosophers and poets exceeding any human merit.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 142
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself. Man was his own grimmest joke on himself.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 142/143
"Man is the animal who laughs."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 143
"Man born of woman and born to trouble . . . "
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 143
"Were you born stupid, Heinrich, or did you have to study?"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 145
Short human words were like trying to life water with a fork.
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 148
As he had told Jubal, Smith knew that shape was never a prime determinant; it was necessary to go beyond shape to essence in order to grok. His own people passed through five major shapes: egg, nymph, nestling, adult -- and Old One which had no shape. Yet the essence of an Old One was patterned in the egg.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 151
"You wanted this, Boss?"
"I wanted to sneer at it. Larry, let this be a lesson: never trust machinery more complicated than a fork."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 155
A mouse was just as much a miracle of biology as an elephant; nevertheless there was a difference
-- an elephant was bigger.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 156
"But -- see here, Jubal, if you ever let on I told you this, I'll cut your lying throat."
"Noted. Agreed. Proceed."
--Jubal Harshaw to network executive from whom he was asking a favour,
Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 159
"That's a serious imputation."
"This is a serious matter."
--Jubal Harshaw to Secretary General Douglas, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 166
"I do trust you, sir." ( -- as far as I could throw a fit!)
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 168
"It's preposterous to talk about having journalists present. We'll see them after everything is settled. But even if we were to admit them, Caxton would not be one. The man is poisonous . . . a keyhole sniffer of the worst sort."
--Secretary-General Douglas, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 168/169
"Mr. Secretary, we have no objection to publicity. In fact, we insist on it."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 169
"Yes, it is a goodness. For water brothers it is a growing closer. I will show you."
"No."
"No?"
"You'd be disappointed, son. It's a growing-closer for water brothers only if they are young girls and pretty -- such as Jill."
"My brother Jubal, you speak rightly?"
"I speak very rightly. Kiss girls all you want to -- it beats the hell out of card games."
--Jubal Harshaw to Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 172
"Boss, I am not a guinea pig! You go to hell."
"In due course, I shall."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 172
"Where the hell have you been?"
"Thinking."
"Doesn't pay. Makes you discontented. Any results?"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 177
"A desire not to butt into other people's business is eighty percent of all human wisdom."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 177
"Duke, the only human characteristic Mike has is an overwhelming desire to be liked."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 177
"'Read it?' Good God! It's bad enough to write such a thing. And don't consider revising, certainly not to fit the facts. My child, a true-confession story should never be tarnished by any taint of truth."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 178
"I didn't do it for you."
"Huh?"
"I did it for a little girl who was about to go charging out and maybe get herself killed. I did it because she was my guest and I stood in loco parentis. I did it because she was all guts and gallantry but too ignorant to monkey with such a buzz saw. But you, my cynical and sin-stained chum, know all about buzz saws. If your carelessness causes you to back into one, who am I to tamper with your Karma?"
--Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 184
"The predestinationers and free-willers were tied in the fourth quarter, last I heard. Either way, I have no wish to disturb a man sleeping in a gutter."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 184
"Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia -- the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death ... before they breed more hemophiliacs."
"You could sterilize them."
"You would have me play God?"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 184
"Those thugs are just a tool; they aren't a Praetorian Guard that picks the Caesar. So whom do you want for Caesar? Courthouse Joe whose indoctrination goes back to when this country was a nation and not a satrapy in a polyglot empire . . . Douglas who can't stomach assassination? Or do you want to toss him out and put in a Secretary-General from a land where life is cheap and assassination a tradition? Ben -- what happens to the next snoopy news-man who walks down a dark alley?"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 184
"Men are always for hire who like dirty work."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 185
"Gadflies are necessary. But it's well to look at the new rascals before you turn your present rascals out."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 185
"Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it's eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents -- a low level, but what can you expect?"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 185
"I expect you to refrain from chewing out Joe Douglas over this coming settlement -- maybe praise him for 'statesmanlike restraint -- '"
"You're making me vomit!"
"Use your hat."
--Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 185
"Ownership is a sophisticated abstraction, a mystical relationship."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 185
"I think it is pious poppycock, suitable for enriching lawns -- "
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 186
"The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable -- from table tapping to the superiority of their children -- has never been plumbed."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 186
"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness [...]"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 186
"Youngster, you can take your instructions, fold them until they are all sharp corners -- and shove them in your oubliette."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 190
"Mr. Smith, we understand you like girls. Have you ever kissed a girl?"
"Yes."
"Did you like it?"
"Yes."
"How did you like it?"
"Kissing girls is a goodness. It beats the hell out of card games."
--Valentine Michael Smith in a press conference, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 191
To Mahmoud, Harshaw looked like a museum exhibit of what he thought of as a "Yank" -- vulgar, dressed too informally for the occasion, loud, probably ignorant, and almost certainly provincial. A professional man, too, which made it worse, and in Dr. Mahmoud's experience American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians. He held a vast distaste for all things American. Their incredibly polytheistic babel of religions, their cooking (cooking!!!), their manners, their
bastard architecture and sickly arts -- and their blind, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun has set.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 193
[Robert A Heinlein had the outmost respect for his native land. However, as the above passage indicates, he did not allow that to blind him to its faults. Rather, he respected his country despite them, and this, to my way of thinking, indicates that he had a true and real respect and love for his land, rather than just a
blind, provincial, chauvinistic patriotism such as is so prevalent today. --MN]
"Look, son. I am being reasonable. We came here for a small, informal meeting. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 197
Presently Douglas concluded, having said nothing and said it very well.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 203
"Once -- just once -- I underrated my mother's power to punish impudence. That lesson was cheap. But this planet cannot afford such a lesson on a planetary scale."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 207
"Don't needle him, Sven. If Stinky gets more mileage out of his sins by regretting, that's his business."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 210
"Consider the black widow spider. A timid little beastie, useful, and the prettiest of the arachnids, with its patent-leather finish and its hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the misfortune of too much power for its size. So everybody kills it."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 215
"Anybody can clap and cheer -- but applause worth while will be found in a pile of soft, green, folding money."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 216
"He's as weird as snake's suspenders but sweet as a stolen kiss."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 216
"But you can go with some firm that will pay you several times what you're getting just for your name on their letterhead. You've had offers?"
"That's beside the point. I'm a professional man."
"Meaning that money can't tempt you into giving up commanding space ships."
--Jubal Harshaw to Captain Van Tromp, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 218
"Daughters can spend ten percent more than a man can make in any usual occupation. That's a law of nature, to be known henceforth as 'Harshaw's Law.'"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 218
"Captain, that's not your style; you don't want to make money, you simply want to spend money."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 218
"Jubal, you talk like a harem guard trying to sell a whole man on the advantages of being a eunuch."
"Possibly. The mind's ability to rationalize its own shortcomings is unlimited; I am no exception."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 218
"A verbalizing race has words for every concept and creates new ones or new definitions whenever a new concept evolves. A nervous system able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing."
--Dr. Mahmoud, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 223
"Anne, I know you were gently reared -- but this is a situation in which rudeness pays off."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 225
"If you want to help him, you will concentrate on teaching him that killing is frowned on in this society. Otherwise he will be conspicuous when he goes out into the world."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 232
"Boss, you're infuriating when you're logical."
"A most uncouth way to argue."
--Jubal Harshaw to Gillian Boardman, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 233
"My dear, there are aspects of sex in which it is impossible to communicate between the two sexes of our race. They are sometimes grokked by intuition across the gulf that separates us by exceptionally gifted individuals. But words are useless."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 233
But he was not in a hurry, "hurry" he failed to grok. He was sensitive to correct timing -- but with Martian approach: timing was accomplished by waiting.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 234
These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not "money"; they were symbols for an idea which spread through these people, all through their world. But things were not money, any more than water shared was growing-closer. Money was an idea, as abstract as an Old One's thoughts -- money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 236
[This passage seems to be based on one of the precepts of General
Semantics: The symbol is not the object; the map is not the territory. See Language In Thought And Action by
Dr. Hayakawa. --MN]
"The boss likes statues."
"Really? I don't see any sculpture around."
"The stuff he likes mostly isn't for sale. He says the crud they make nowadays looks like disaster in a junk yard and any idiot with a blow torch and astigmatism calls himself a sculptor." -Duke on Jubal Harshaw's tastes in art, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 238
(see also the characterizations by Gigi Branca about Joe's attitudes in I Will Fear No Evil, 411 and also I Will Fear No Evil,
434)
"Religion is a solace to many and it is conceivable that some religion, somewhere, is Ultimate Truth. But being religious is often a form of conceit. The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was 'saved,' they were 'damned' -- we were in a state of grace and the rest were 'heathens.' By 'heathen' they meant such as our brother Mahmoud. Ignorant louts who bathed and planted corn by the Moon claimed to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled them to look down on outsiders. Our hymns were loaded with arrogance -- self-congratulations on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what Hell everybody else would catch come Judgment Day. We peddled the only authentic brand of Lydia Pinkham's -- "
"Jubal! He doesn't grok it."
--Jubal Harshaw lecturing Valentine Michael Smith on religion until cut off by Jill, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 240
"Don't scoff, girl. I would have made a good one if I hadn't fallen into the fatal folly of reading. With a touch more confidence and liberal helping of ignorance I would have been a famous evangelist."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 240 [Continued to quotation below]
"A confidence man knows he's lying; that limits his scope. But a successful shaman believes what he says -- and belief is contagious; there is no limit to his scope. But I lacked the necessary confidence in my own infallibility; I could never be a prophet ... just a critic -- a sort of fourth-rate prophet with delusions of gender."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 240
[Given the penchant organized religions have for suppressing woman in the name of God, it is likely
that the choice of the term "gender" above is a paraphrasing and not a misquoting of "delusions of grandeur". If deliberate, the choice is somewhat ambiguous, as it does not quite fit the context except in the subtle way I have pointed out. --MN]
"My dear, religion is a null area in the law. A church can do anything any organization can do -- and has no restrictions. It pays no taxes, need not publish records, is effectively immune to search, inspection, or control -- and a church is anything that calls itself a church. Attempts have been made to distinguish between 'real' religions entitled to immunities and 'cults.' It can't be done, short of establishing a state religion . . . a cure worse than the disease. Both under
what's left of the United States Constitution and under the Treaty of Federation, all churches are equally immune -- especially if they swing a bloc of votes."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 241
"There is no safety this side of the grave."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 241
"The New Revelation is old stuff. Neither Foster nor Digby ever had an original thought. They pieced together time-worn tricks, gave them a new paint job, and were in business. A booming business. The thing that bothers me is that I might live to see it made compulsory for everybody. [...] Hitler started with less and all he peddled was hate. For repeat trade happiness is sounder merchandise."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 255/256
"Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to do, every time. If it pains them to make a choice -- if the choice looks like 'sacrifice' -- you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness . . . necessity of choosing between two things you want when you can't have them both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids,
between getting up and going to work or losing his job. But he always chooses what hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint makes the same choices on a larger scale. As Digby does. Saint or scoundrel, he's not one of the harried chumps."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 256
"Minds me of a wife who was proud of her virtue. Slept with other men only when her husband was away."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 257
"That's different."
"Everything always is -- and the more it changes, the more it is the same."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 257
"I am not running down the Bible. It isn't a patch on the pornographic trash that passes as sacred writing among Hindus. Or a dozen other religions. But I'm not condemning them either; it is conceivable that one of these mythologies is the word of God ... that God is in truth the sort of paranoid Who rends to bits forty-two children for sassing his priest. Don't ask me about the Front Office; I just work here."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 259
"I don't enjoy snake dances, I despise crowds, and I do not let slobs tell me where to go on Sundays. I simply object to your criticizing them for the wrong things."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 259/260
"Jubal . . . is it possible for a man to die and not notice it?"
"Can't say. Never tried it."
--Jubal Harshaw to Dr. Mahmoud, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 262
[It is enough to make one wonder as to whether or not Jubal was answering seriously or flippantly. If one stops to think about the question for a moment, the non sequitur in the answer becomes apparent. (My money is on flippant.) --MN]
He had arrived at cusp, right action had been required, the choice had been his. He grokked that he had chosen correctly. But his water brother Jill had forbidden this choice --
But that would have left no choice. This was contradiction; at cusp, choice is. By choice, spirit grows.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 263
His water brother could teach, admonish, guide -- but choice at cusp was not shared.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 263
(The Reverend Foster had realized that, in upholding religious freedom, brass knuckles, clubs, and a willingness to tangle with cops outweighed passive resistance. His was a church militant from scratch. But he had been a tactician; battles were fought where the heavy artillery was on the side of the Lord.)
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 281
Valentine Michael Smith grokked that physical human love -- very human and very physical -- was not simply a quickening of eggs, nor was it ritual through which one grew closer, the act itself was a growing-closer.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 285
His human teachers, gentle and generous, had instructed his innocence without bruising it. The result was as unique as he was.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 285
"If God hated flesh, why'd he make so much of it?"
--Patty Paiwonski
The culture known as "America" had a split personality throughout its history. Its laws were puritanical; its covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were Appollonian; its revivals were almost Dionysian. In the twentieth century (Terran Christian Era) nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed -- and nowhere was there such deep interest in it.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 289
. . . she'd be kicking and screaming and foaming ectoplasm at all orifices . . .
--Archangel Foster contemplating the reception of the soul of Alice Douglas,
Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 299
"I don't think waiting will fill it. I know what's wrong; I'm not a man, I'm a Martian -- a Martian in a body of the wrong shape."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 307
" -- you don't grok a desert by counting its grains of sand."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 309
"I grok people. I am people . . . so now I can say it in people talk. I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts ... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 312
"I grok when apes learn to laugh they will be people."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 313
"I had thought -- I had been told -- that a 'funny' thing is a thing of goodness. It isn't. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. Like that sheriff without his pants. The goodness is in the laughing. I grok it is a bravery ... and a sharing ... against pain and sorrow and defeat."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 314
"On Mars there is never anything to laugh at. All the things that are funny to us humans either cannot happen on Mars or are not permitted to happen -- sweetheart, what you call freedom doesn't exist on Mars: everything is planned by the Old Ones -- or things that do happen on Mars which we laugh at here on Earth aren't funny because there is no wrongness about them. Death for example."
"Death isn't funny."
"Then why are there so many jokes about death?"
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 314
"Point to the shortest direction around the universe. It doesn't matter where you point, it's the shortest . . . and you're pointing back at yourself."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 315
Mike put in a few weeks as assistant chaplain at his churchmouse alma mater -- then broke with the sect in a schism and founded his own church. Completely kosher, legally airtight, as venerable in precedent as Martin Luther -- and as nauseating as last week's garbage.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 322
"Please, Ben. 'Statues' are dead politicians. This is 'sculpture.' Please speak in a reverent tone lest I become violent."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 322
"Have you ever known me to be rude to a lady?"
"I have seen you be intentionally rude to a woman. I have never seen you be rude to a lady."
--Anne as Fair Witness to Jubal Harshaw in answer to an aspersion cast by Ben Caxton,
Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 323
"Jubal, I thought you weren't a Christian?"
"Does that make me blind to human emotion? The crummiest plaster crucifix can evoke emotions in the human heart so strong that many have died for them. The artistry with which such a symbol is wrought is irrelevant. Here we have another emotional symbol -- but wrought with exquisite artistry. Ben, for three thousand years architects designed buildings with columns shaped as female figures. At last Rodin pointed out that this was work too heavy for a girl. He didn't say, 'Look, you jerks, if you must do this, make it a brawny male figure.' No, he showed it. This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She's a good girl -- look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone, not even the gods . . . and still trying to shoulder her load, after she's crumpled under it.
"But she's more than good art denouncing bad art; she's a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women -- this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude until they crumpled under their loads. It's courage, Ben, and victory."
"'Victory?'"
"Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up, Ben; she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She's a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She's a twelve-year-old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because mama had to go to Heaven. She's a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts of her escape. She's all the unsung heroes who couldn't make it but never quit.
Come. Salute as you pass and come see my Little Mermaid."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 324
"Jubal, why isn't there stuff like this where people can see it?"
"Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times. Rodin died about the time the world started flipping its lid. His successors noted the amazing things he had done with light and shadow and mass and composition and they copied that part. What they failed to see was that the master told stories that laid bare the human heart. They became contemptuous of painting or sculpture that told stories -- the dubbed such work 'literary.' They went all out for abstractions.
"Abstract design is all right -- for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience. These laddies who won't deign to do that -- or can't -- lose the public. The ordinary bloke will not buy 'art' that leaves him unmoved. If he does pay, the money is conned out of him, by taxes or such."
"Jubal, I've always wondered why I didn't give a hoot for art. I thought it was something missing in me."
"Mmmm, one does have to learn to look at art. But it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood. Most of these jokers don't want to use language you and I can learn; they would rather sneer because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If anything. Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence."
--Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 325/326
[Continued to following quotation]
"Ben, would you call me an artist?"
"Huh? You write a fair stick."
"Thank you. 'Artist' is a word I avoid for the same reason I hate to be called 'Doctor.' But I am an artist. Most of my stuff is worth reading only once . . . and not even once by a person who knows the little I have to say. But I am an honest artist. What I write is intended to reach the customer -- and affect him, if possible with pity and terror . . . or at least divert the tedium of his hours. I never hide from him in a private language, nor am I seeking praise from other
writers for 'technique' or other balderdash. I want praise from the customer, given in cash because I've reached him -- or I don't want anything. Support for the arts -- merde! A government supported artist is an incompetent whore!"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 326
(see I Will Fear No Evil, 411 and also I Will Fear No Evil, 434)
"Ben, in all the years I have studied this subject, trying to trace the meanderings of their twisty little minds, the only thing I have learned is that when a gal is gonna, she's gonna. All a man can do is cooperate with the inevitable."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 327
"Ben, I do not mind being treated flippantly by my juniors, But in this matter I insist that my years be treated with respect."
"Sorry, I thought if it was all right for you to kick my sex life around, you would not mind my being equally frank."
"No, no, Ben! -- you misunderstand. I require the girls to treat me with respect -- on this subject."
--Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 329
"Privately, I am happy to say that I am still lecherous. But lechery does not command me. I prefer dignity to indulging in pastimes which, believe me, I have enjoyed in full measure and do not need to repeat."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 329
"Better to be tempted and resist, than be disappointed."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 330
"Whenever anyone comes here to live, I make it plain that this is neither a sweat shop nor a whore house, but a home . . . and, as such, it combines anarchy and tyranny without a trace of democracy, as in any well-run family, i.e., they are on their own except where I give orders, which orders are not subject to debate."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 330
"Be your acts legal or illegal, nosy neighbors are noxious."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 332
"The universe is a thing we whipped up among us and agreed to forget the gag."
--Ben Caxton paraphrasing a preaching of Valentine Michael Smith,
Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 339
"Solipsism and pantheism. Together they explain everything. Cancel out any inconvenient fact, reconcile all theories, include any facts or delusions you like. But it's cotton candy, all taste and no substance."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 339
"The word is 'Appollonian.' [...] As opposed to 'Dionysian.' People simplify 'Appollonian' into 'mild,' and 'calm,' and 'cool.' But 'Appollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin -- a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstasy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox. Ecstasy is in the skull, not the setting-up exercises."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 341
"How can you rule out real miracles, Ben?"
"It's not a theory I like."
--Ben Caxton to Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 342
"The human body is often pleasing, frequently depressing -- and never significant per se."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 345
"You go into a man's house, you accept his household rules. That's a universal rule of civilized behavior."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 361
"Public displays of rut I find distasteful -- but this reflects my early indoctrination. A large part of mankind do not share my taste; the orgy has a very wide history. But 'shocking'? My dear sir, I am shocked only by that which offends me ethically."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 361
"You knew the score and they knew you knew; their error lay in accepting your hypocrisy as solid coin."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 362
"So you claim reflex? Anyone over the emotional age of twelve would have clamped his jaws and walked to the bathroom, then returned with some acceptable excuse after things cooled down. It was not reflex. Reflex can empty the stomach; it can't choose a course for feet, recover chattels, take you through doors and cause you to jump down a hole."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 362
"What is 'love,' Ben? [...] I'll give an exact definition. 'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 363
"Jubal, you're chicken."
"Precisely, sir!"
--Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 364
"But my worry is not over their morals but dangers to them from outside."
"Oh, they're in no trouble that way."
"You think so? If you dye a monkey pink and shove him into a cage of brown monkeys, they'll tear him to pieces. Those innocents are courting martyrdom."
--Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 364
" -- after all, this isn't the Dark Ages."
"Really? I hadn't noticed the change."
--Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 364
"Over and over it's been the same sad story: a plan for perfect sharing and perfect love, glorious hopes and high ideals -- then persecution and failure."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 365
"Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with -- in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called 'Morals.' Most of us know the code is wrong, almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 365 [Continued to following quote]
"You too, Ben. You fancy yourself a free soul -- and break that evil code. But faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you tested it against the same Judeo-Christian code ... so automatically your stomach did flip-flops ... and you think that proves you're right and they're wrong. Faugh! I'd as leif use trial by ordeal. All your stomach can reflect is prejudice trained into you before you acquired reason."
"What about your stomach?"
"Mine is stupid too -- but I don't let it rule my brain."
--Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 365 [Continued to following quote]
"I see the beauty of Mike's attempting to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven't the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code -- monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth -- then fiddle with details . . . even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight.
"But mostly they debate how we can be made to obey this code -- ignoring the evidence that most tragedies they see around them are rooted in the code itself rather than in failure to abide by it."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 365
"Sex should be a means of happiness. Ben, the worst thing about sex is that we use it to hurt each other. It ought never to hurt; it should bring happiness, or at least, pleasure.
"The code says, 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.' The result? Reluctant chastity, adultery, jealousy, bitterness, blows and sometimes murder, broken homes and twisted children -- and furtive little passes degrading to woman and man. Is this Commandment ever obeyed? If a man swore on his own bible that he refrained from coveting his neighbor's wife because the code forbade it, I would suspect either self-deception or subnormal sexuality. Any male virile enough to sire a
child has coveted many women, whether he acts or not."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 366
"Ben, I was born in a house with no more plumbing than an igloo; I prefer the present. Nevertheless, Eskimos were invariably described as the happiest people on Earth. Any unhappiness they suffered was not through jealousy; they didn't have a word for it. They borrowed spouses for convenience and fun -- it did not make them unhappy. So who's looney?"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 366
"Ben, the foulest sinner of all is the hypocrite who makes a racket of religion. But we must give the Devil his due. Mike does believe and he's teaching the truth as he sees it."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 367
"All names belong in the hat, Ben. Man is so built that he cannot imagine his own death. This leads to endless invention of religions. While this conviction by no means proves immortality to be a fact, questions generated by it are overwhelmingly important."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 367
"The nature of life, how ego hooks into the body, the problem of ego itself and why each ego seems to be the center of the universe, the purpose of life, the purpose of the universe -- these are paramount questions, Ben; they can never be trivial. Science hasn't solved them -- and who am I to sneer at religions for trying, no matter how unconvincingly to me? Old Mumbo Jumbo may eat me yet; I can't rule him out because he owns no fancy cathedrals. Nor can I rule out one godstruck boy leading
a sex cult in an upholstered attic, he might be the Messiah. The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together!"
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 368
"But most people never think about it; they seal it off and mark it: 'Holy--Do Not Disturb.'
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 369
"Your bitching about friendly fornication -- do you know what I'm worried about?" [...] "Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Sweat over that, instead."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 370
"That's the catch in artistic pursuits; the best work is worth most after the workman can't be paid. The literary life -- Dreck! It consists of scratching the cat till it purrs."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 376
"You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 376
"My dear, I was avoiding honest work before you were born -- don't teach Grandpa how to suck eggs."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 377
"I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth -- then shut up."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 380
As pointless as disturbing a hibernating bear.
--Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 385
"Mike isn't gentle, Jubal. Killing a man wouldn't worry him. But he's the ultimate anarchist -- locking a man up is a wrongness. Freedom of self -- and utter personal responsibility for self. Thou art God."
"Wherein lies the conflict, sir? Killing a man may be necessary. But confining him is an offense against his integrity."
--Jubal Harshaw and Ben Caxton, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 393
"Sir, I was saying that when one is of my age, one is necessarily in a hurry about some things. Each sunrise is a precious jewel . . . for it may never be followed by its sunset."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 380
"But, Jubal my beloved brother, I am still God's slave, submissive to his will . . . and nevertheless can say: Thou art God, I am God, all that groks is God.' The prophet never asserted that he was the last of all prophets nor did he claim to have said all there was to say. Submission to God's will is not to be a robot, incapable of choice and thus of sin. Submission can include -- does include -- utter responsibility for the fashion in which I, and each of us, shape the universe. It is
ours to turn into a heavenly garden . . . or to rend and destroy."
--Dr. Mahmoud, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 396/397
"Stinky, theology always gives me the pip."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 380
"Poor fellow. He's bitten a wooden leg and his teeth hurt."
--Sam commenting on the District Attorney's inability to come to grips with Mike's miracles, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 404
"Then why did you take collection?"
"Huh? Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks don't pay attention if it's free."
"I knew that, I wondered if you did."
"Oh, yes, I grok marks, Jubal. At first I did preach free. Didn't work. We humans have to make considerable progress before we accept a free gift, and value it. I never let them have anything free until Sixth Circle. By then they can accept . . . and accepting is much harder than giving."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 414
"But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 415
"Mike, I know you are brilliant. You possess powers that I don't and have never seen before. But a man can be a genius and still have delusions."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 415/416
"Okay. I'll never boggle at slicing with Occam's Razor."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 418
"Yes. Self. I must grok each cusp myself alone. And so must you . . . and so must each self. Thou art God."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 419
"Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 419
"Male-femaleness is the greatest gift we have -- romantic physical love may be unique to this planet. If it is, the universe is a poorer place than it could be . . . "
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 419
"That's what sexual union should be. But that's what I slowly grokked it rarely was. Instead it was indifference and acts mechanically performed and rape and seduction as a game no better than roulette but less honest and prostitution and celibacy by choice and by no choice and fear and guilt and hatred and violence and children brought up to think that sex was 'bad' and 'shameful' and 'animal' and something to be hidden and always distrusted. This lovely perfect thing, male-femaleness,
turned upside down and inside out and made horrible."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 420
"Aren't you afraid of playing God, lad?"
"I am God. Thou art God . . . and any jerk I remove is God, too. Jubal, it is said that God notes each sparrow that falls. And so He does. But the closest it can be said in English is that God cannot avoid noting the sparrow because the sparrow is God. And when a cat stalks a sparrow both of them are God, carrying out God's thoughts."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 421
"A very few, just these few here with us, our brothers, understood me and accepted the bitter along with the sweet, stood up and drank it -- grokked it. The others, hundreds and thousands of others, either insisted on treating it as a prize without a contest -- a 'conversion' -- or ignored it. No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort
has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one they can't or won't entertain."
--Valentine Michael Smith, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 422/423
"You've been fretting that since you failed to hook ninety-nine out of a hundred, the race couldn't get along without its present evils, had to have them for weeding out. But damn it, lad, you've been doing the weeding -- rather the failures have been doing it by not listening to you."
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 423
He had had so much to live for . . . and an old fool that he respected too much had to shoot off his yap and goad him into a needless, useless martyrdom. If Mike had given them something big -- like stereo, or bingo -- but he gave them the Truth. Or a piece of the Truth. And who is interested in Truth?
--Jubal Harshaw, Stranger In A Strange Land, pg 431
I was tempted to ask for an explanation of "mass hypnosis" -- but nobody wanted to hear from me; I was junior -- not necessarily in years but in the cruise ship Konge Knut . That's how it is in cruise ships: Anyone who has been in the vessel since port of departure is senior to anyone who joins the ship later. The Medes and the Persians laid down this law and nothing can change it. I had flown down in the Count von Zeppelin, at Papeete I would fly home in the Admiral
Moffet, so I was forever junior and should keep quiet while my betters pontificated.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 2
Cruise ships have the best food and, all too often, the worst conversation in the world.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 2
Never let an oaf cause you to lose your judgment.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 4
Taxis in Polynesia are always outrageous, especially when the drivers have you at their mercy, of which they have none.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 8
Any unbiased judge would have to admit that I am reasonably sophisticated. I am aware that some places do not have America's high moral standards and are careless about indecent exposure. I know that Polynesian women used to run around naked from the waist up until civilization came along -- shucks, I read the National Geographic.
But I never expected to see it.
Before I made my fire walk the villagers were dressed just as you would expect: grass skirts but with the women's bosoms covered.
But when they kissed me hello-goodbye the were not. Not covered, I mean. Just like the National Geographic.
Now I appreciate feminine beauty. Those delightful differences, seen under proper circumstances with shades decently drawn, can be dazzling. But forty odd (no, even) of them are intimidating. I saw more human, feminine busts than I had ever seen before, total and cumulative, in my entire life. The Methodist Episcopal Society for Temperance and Morals would have been shocked right out of their wits.
With adequate warning I am sure that I could have enjoyed the experience. As it was, it was too new, too much, too fast. I could appreciate it only in retrospect.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 10
My father used to tell me, "Alex, there is nothing wrong with being scared . . . as long you don't let it affect you until the danger is over. Being hysterical is okay too . . . afterwards and in private. Tears are not unmanly . . . in the bathroom with the door locked. The difference between a coward and a brave man is mostly a matter of timing."
I'm not the man my father was but I try to follow his advice. If you learn not to jump when the firecracker goes off -- or whatever the surprise is -- you stand a good chance of being able to hang tight until the emergency is over.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 13
Good questions. I'm glad you brought them up. Now, class, are there any more questions --
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 15
When I was in middle school there was a spate of magazines publishing fantastic stories, not alone ghost stories but weird yarns of every sort. Magic ships plying the ether to other stars. Strange inventions. Trips to the center of the earth. Other "dimensions." Flying machines. Power from burning atoms. Monsters created in secret laboratories.
I used to buy them and hide them inside copies of Youth's Champion and of Young Defenders knowing instinctively that my parents would disapprove and confiscate. I loved them and so did my outlaw chum Bert.
It couldn't last. First there was an editorial in Youth's Champion: "Poison to the Soul -- Stamp it Out!" Then our pastor, Brother Draper, preached a sermon against such mind-corrupting trash, with comparisons to the evil effects of cigarettes and booze. Then our state outlawed such publications under the "standards of the community" doctrine even before passage of the national law and parallel executive order.
And a cache I had hidden "perfectly" in our attic disappeared. Worse, the works of Mr. H.G. Wells and Mr. Jules Verne and some others were taken out of our public library.
You have to admire the motives of our spiritual leaders and elected officials in seeking to protect the minds of the young. As Brother Draper pointed out, there are enough exciting and adventurous stories in the Good Book to satisfy the needs of every boy and girl in the world; there was simply no need for profane literature. He was not urging censorship of books for adults, just for the impressionable young. If persons of mature years wanted to read such fantastic trash suffer them to do
so -- although he, for one, could not see why any grown man would want to.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 15/16
Alex, the French colonials will love you. No baggage, only the clothes on your back, no money, not a sou -- no passport! Oh, they will love you so much they'll give you room and board for the rest of your life...in an oubliette with a grill over the top.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 17
Listen, my retarded friend, do you think logic has anything to do with the predicament we are in?
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 18
"Table assignment"! Ouch! A passenger who has been aboard even one day does not have to ask how to find his table in the dining room. It's the little things that trip you.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 19
I did not consider remaining in Polynesia. Being a penniless beachcomber on Bora-Bora or Moorea may have been practical a hundred years ago but today the only thing free in these islands is contagious disease.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 19/20
How do you walk back through a fire pit?
And did I want to?
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 25
(If you grab the bull by the horns, you at least confuse him.)
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 25
Our church doesn't hold with the doctrine that the flesh is weak and therefore sin is humanly understandable and readily forgiven. Sin can be forgiven but just barely and you are surely going to catch if first. Sin should suffer.
I found out about some of that suffering. I'm told it is called a hangover.
That is what my drinking uncle called it. Uncle Ed maintained that no man can cope with temperance who has not had a full course of intemperance . . . otherwise when temptation came his way, he would not know how to handle it.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 27
(see also the entry for page 54)
As it was he was not pressed to stay longer and was not urged to hurry back.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 28
And my wonder circuits were overloaded anyhow.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 29
-- he has muscles where other men don't even have places. It is very hard to argue with him.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 29/30
But look -- when a lady comes up and puts her arms around you and insists on kissing you, it is difficult not to notice that she isn't wearing enough to ward of pneumonia. Or other chest complaints.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 32
Even bare skin did not startle me as much as bare words -- language I had never heard in public in my life and extremely seldom even in private among men only.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 32
The most shocking thing that ever happened to me in my boyhood was one day crossing the town square, noticing a crowd on the penance side of the courthouse, joining it to see who was catching it and why . . . and finding my scoutmaster in the stocks.
His offense was profane language, so the sign on his chest told us. The accuser was his own wife; he did not dispute it and had thrown himself on the mercy of the court -- the judge was Deacon Brumby, who didn't know the word.
Mr. Kirk, my Scoutmaster, left town two weeks later and nobody ever saw him again -- being exposed in the stocks was likely to have that effect on a man.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 32
Between shocking speech, incredible immodest exposure, and effects of two sorts of strange and deceptive potions lavishly administered, I was utterly confused. A stranger in a strange land, I was overcome by customs new and shocking.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 33
If one admits for the sake of argument that customs in dress can be wildly different without destroying the fabric of society (a possibility I do not concede but will stipulate), then it helps, I think, if the person exhibiting this difference is young and healthy and comely.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 35
Never mind "them." You did it yourself, chum.
Yes, but --
"Yes, but." Always "Yes, but." All your life it's been "Yes, but." When are you going to straighten up and take full responsibility for your life and all that happens to you?
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 39
"Well . . . brave men often drink too much, after danger is over. But it's not good for you."
--Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 42
You've got a smart head on her shoulders, boy -- appreciate it.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 43
"What was that your grandmother sued to say when your grandfather argued?"
[...]
"Well -- She used to say that God created men to test the souls of women."
--Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson to Alexander Hergensheimer,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 43
When a Coca-Cola costs two dollars it does not mean that a Coke is bigger, it means that the dollar is smaller.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 46
([...] But let's not borrow trouble; I have all I need.)
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 47
I was discovering that a lifetime of conditioning could wash away in only twenty-four hours. There was nothing sinful about looking at feminine loveliness unadorned. It was as sweetly innocent as looking at flowers or kittens -- but far more fun.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 54
I has sobered up so much that I now realized that I not only could not solve my problems through sprits but must shun alcohol until I did solve them -- as I did not know how to handle strong drink. Uncle Ed was right; vice required training and long practice -- otherwise for pragmatic reasons virtue should rule even when moral instruction has ceased to bind.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 54
(see Glory Road,
259, and the entry for page 27)
My morals had slipped -- apparently they were never very strong. But I still had this prejudice against stealing. It's not only wrong, it's undignified.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 55
I once had a neighbor whose knowledge of history seemed limited to two dates, 1492 and 1776, and even with those two years he was mixed up as to what events each marked. His ignorance in other fields was just as profound; nevertheless he earned an excellent living as a paving contractor.
It does not require a broad education to function as a social and economic animal . . . as long as you know when to rub blue mud in your bellybutton. But a mistake in local custom can get you lynched.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 57
Let me put it this way: On her birthday after we had been married a year I gave Abigail a fancy edition of The Taming Of The Shrew. She never suspected that I had been making a statement; her conviction of her own righteousness did not embrace the possibility that in my heart I equated her with Kate.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 57
I would not knowingly wish Abigail on anyone. Since I had not been consulted, I did not cry crocodile tears.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 57
Comparative religion, homiletics, higher criticism, apologetics, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, all require scholarship . . . but the slipstick subjects require brains.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 59
So I'm stupid am I?
Would you have walked through that fire pit if you had brains enough to come in out of the rain?
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 59
The next many days were very sweet, in the fashion that grapes grow sweetest on the slopes of a live volcano.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 66
On reflection I realized that I was in exactly the same predicament as every other human being alive: We don't know who we are, or where we came from, or why we are here. My dilemma was merely fresher, not different.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 67
I offer in extenuation the fact that I had known only the "love" of a woman who loved Jesus so much that she no real affection for any flesh-and-blood creature.
Never marry a woman who prays too much.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 69
A cummerbund and a boiled shirt are better than a straitjacket but not much.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 76
"All that Jesus said was: 'Go and sin no more.' Surely you do not think I would ever set myself up as more severely judgmental than Jesus?"
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 80
Will you destroy your self-respect for a million dollars? For ten million? For five dollars?
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 82
I can keep myself uselessly occupied with self-flagellation for an entire night when my latest attack of foot-in-mouth disease is severe. This current one bid fair to keep me staring at the ceiling for days.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 85
"Keeping your head in a crunch and doing it in pitch darkness isn't learned from lessons; [...]"
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 90
The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 93
"Paranoia is the only rational approach to a conspiracy world."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 101
"But, Alec, the world ought not to be that way."
"There is no 'ought' to it, my love. The essence of philosophy is to accept the universe as it is, rather than try to force it into some preconceived shape."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 101
Certainly she was naked, but that was not her fault, and a gentleman should not stare.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 107
"Tell him not to bother to cook the horse; I'll eat it raw."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 110
And I was clothed. Some at least -- a pair of dungaree trousers. But the difference between bare naked and a pair of pants is far greater than the difference between cheap work trousers and the finest ermine. Try it and you'll see.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 111
(At first I had been a bit miffed that we ate in the enlisted men's mess rather than going with Lieutenant Sanz to wherever the officers ate. Much later I had it pointed out to me that I suffered from a very common civilian syndrome, i.e., a civilian with no military experience unconsciously equates his social position to that of officers, never to that of enlisted men. On examination this notion is obviously ridiculous -- but it was almost universal. Oh, perhaps not universal but it
obtains throughout America . . . where every man is "as good as anyone else and better than most.")
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 112
Had I been alone I think he would simply have called me a liar . . . but it is difficult for a male man bursting with masculine ego to talk that way to Margrethe.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 113
Mexicans were simply fellow travelers from dark to eternal darkness. Some carried their burdens well, some did not. And some carried very heavy burdens with gallantry and grace. Like Pepe.
Yesterday I had been living in luxury; today I was broke and in debt. But I have my health, I have my brain, I have my two hands -- and I have Margrethe. My burdens were light; I should carry them joyfully.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 119
Barefooted and in a garish dress, Margrethe was a lady -- I was riffraff. Don't ask me why this was so; it just was. The effect was most marked with men. But it worked with women, too. Try to rationalize it and you find yourself using works like "royal," "noble," "gentry," and "to the manner born" -- all involving concept's anathema to the American democratic ideal. Whether this proves something about Margrethe or something about the democratic ideal I will leave as an exercise for the
student.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 119/120
(Minor theological note: Many people seem to believe that the Ten Commandments forbid lying. Not at all! The prohibition is against bearing false witness against your neighbor -- a specific, limited, and despicable sort of lie. But there is no Biblical rule forbidding simple untruth. Many theologians believe that no human social organization could stand up under the strain of absolute honesty. If you think their misgivings are unfounded, try telling your friends the ungarnished truth
about what you think of their offspring -- if you dare risk it.)
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 120/121
Patrones ride; Peones walk.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 124
It is impossible (I think) to conquer roaches, but it is possible to fight them to a draw, force them back and maintain a holding action.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 127
But just because I did it well, do not think I was enamored of dishwashing. It had bored me as a child; it bored me as a man.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 127
There is one advantage to being a peon: You don't get fired over a disagreement with your boss.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 130
Don Jaime treated us as employees, his wife treated us as slaves. Despite that old cliche about "wage slaves," there is a world of difference. Since we both tried hard to be faithful employees while paying off our debt but flatly refused to be slaves, we were bound to tangle with Senora Valera.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 131
Some problems are best let be, not chewed over with words. This modern compulsion to "talk it out" is a mistake at least as often as it is a solution.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 132
Margrethe said nothing -- characteristically. If she disagreed, she usually said nothing. She seemed to have no interest in winning arguments, in which she must differ from 99 percent of the human race . . . many of whom appear willing to suffer any disaster rather than lose an argument.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 135
" -- while noting for purposes of scientific accuracy that some authorities assert that, while bliss is eternal, God so loves the world that even the damned may eventually be saved; no soul is utterly beyond redemption. Other theologians regard this as heresy -- but it appeals to me; I have never liked the idea of eternal damnation. I'm a sentimentalist, my dear."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 135
[This quote hints obliquely at the highly subjective nature
of religious beliefs -- IMNSHO. --MN]
"At Ragnarok the world as we know it will be destroyed. But that is not the end. After a long time, a time of healing, a new universe will be created, one better and cleaner and free from the evils of this world. It too will last for countless millennia ... until again the forces of evil and cold contend against the forces of goodness and light ... and again there is a time of rest followed by a new creation and another chance for men. Nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever perfect, but over and over again the race of men gets another chance to do better than last time, ever and again without end."
"And this you believe, Margrethe?"
"I find it easier to believe that the smugness of the saved and the desperate plight of the damned in the Christian faith. Jehovah is said to be all powerful. If this is true, then the poor damned souls in Hell are there because Jehovah planned it that way in every minute detail. Is this not so?"
--Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson to Alexander Hergensheimer,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 138/139
The logical reconciliation of Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnibenevolence is the thorniest problem in theology, one causing even Jesuits to break their teeth.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 139
(A theology that avoids the thorniest problem--But how can you call Him "God" if He is not Omnipotent?)
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 140
"The Jehovah or Yahweh of the Old Testament seems to be a sadistic, bloodthirsty, genocidal villain. I cannot understand how He can be identified with the gentle Christ of the New Testament. Even through a mystic Trinity."
--Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 140/141
But Loki? Ask me to believe that mythical demigod of an ignorant, barbarian race has wrought changes in the whole universe? Now, really!
I am a modern man, with an open mind -- but not so empty that the wind blows through it. Somewhere in Holy Writ lay a rational explanation for the upsets that had happened to us.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 142
I was born too late to meet Preachin' Paul, so I never saw him do this -- but perfect memory is a special gift God bestows not too infrequently; I have no reason to doubt that Brother Paul had it. Paul died suddenly, somewhat mysteriously, and possibly sinfully -- in the words of my mission studies professor, one should exercise great prudence in praying alone with a married woman.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 143
Being an ordained minister of the Gospel does not necessarily improve one's chances. Clergymen are aware of this cold truth (if they are honest with themselves) but laymen sometimes think that men of the cloth have an inside track.
Not true! For a clergyman, there are no excuses. He can never claim that "he didn't know it was loaded," or cite youth and inexperience as a reason to ask for mercy, or claim ignorance of the law, or any of the other many excuses by which a layman might show a touch less than moral perfection but still be saved.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 144
One does not persuade a butterfly to light on one's hand by brandishing a sword.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 145
Another matter was a pet project of my own: the frustrating of astronomers. Few laymen realize what mischief astronomers are up to. I first noticed it when I was still in engineering school and took a course in descriptive astronomy under the requirements for breadth in each student's program. Give an astronomer a bigger telescope and turn him loose, leave him unsupervised, and the first thing he does is to come down with pestiferous, half-baked guesses denying the ancient truths of Genesis.
There is only one way to deal with this sort of nonsense: Hit them in the pocketbook! Redefine "educational" to exclude those colossal white elephants, astronomical observatories. Make the Naval Observatory the only one tax free, reduce its staff, and limit their activity to matters clearly related to navigation. (Some of the most blasphemous and subversive theories have come from tenured civil servants there who don't have enough legitimate work to keep them busy.)
Self-styled "scientists" are usually up to no good, but astronomers are the worst of the lot.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 150
Another matter that comes up regularly at each annual prayer meeting I did not favor spending time or money on: "Votes for Women." These hysterical females styling themselves as "suffragettes" are not a threat, can never win, and it just makes them feel self-important to pay attention to them. They should not be jailed and should not be displayed in stocks -- never let them be martyrs! Ignore them.
There were other interesting and worthwhile goals that I kept off the agenda an did not suffer to be brought up from the floor in the sessions I moderated, but instead carried them on my "Maybe next year" list:
Separate schools for boys and girls.
Restoring the death penalty for witchcraft and satanism.
The Alaska option for the Negro problem.
Federal control of prostitution.
Homosexuals -- what's the answer? Punishment? Surgery? Other?
There are endless good causes commending themselves to the guardians of the public morals -- the question is always how to pick and choose to the greater glory of God.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 150/151
"Darling you are so logical and reasonable and civilized that you sometimes drive me right straight up the wall."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 154
In Mexico a man has his dignity or he is dead.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 156
I had a deep conviction that any looter was a potential rapist and murderer. I was prepared to die for Margrethe should it become necessary -- but I had no wish to die gallantly but futilely in a confrontation that could have been avoided.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 163
I resented the name assigned to this sanitary routine -- a requirement that you take delousing is a way of saying that you are lousy.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 165
But once I was dressed again, I got over my anger, realizing that no one was intentionally pushing me around; it was simply that any improvised procedure for handling crowds of people in an emergency is almost certain to be destructive of human dignity.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 165
I'm stupid but not stubborn.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 167
Either you have this invention and are used to it and take it for granted, or you live in a world that does not have it -- and you don't believe me. Learn from me, as I have been forced to believe unbelievable things.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 169
If you ever find yourself flat broke in a strange city and no one to turn to, and you do not want to turn yourself in at a police station and don't want to be mugged, there is just one best answer for emergency help. You will usually find it in the city's tenderloin, near skid row:
The Salvation Army.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 169
( -- warning to inter-world travelers: Minor changes can be even more confusing that major changes.)
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 169
"There may be refuges for the homeless here that are totally unconnected with a church, I'm not sure, as churches tend to monopolize the field -- nobody else wants it."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 171
No matter how many people are out of work, there are always dishwashing jobs going begging.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 174
I could go on indefinitely listing the things I was not, and could not learn overnight. But that is pointless.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 175
A competent and reliable dishwasher never starves. (He's more likely to die of boredom.)
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 175
Pray tell me why there is not a dishwashing school of philosophy? The conditions would seem ideal for indulging in the dear delights of attempting to unscrew the inscrutable. The work keeps the body busy while demanding almost nothing of the brain.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 178
There comes a time when a faithful worshipper must get up off his knees and deal with his Lord God in blunt and practical terms.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 180
In fund raising and in political action one must (while of course shunning heresy) avoid arguments on fiddling points of doctrine. Word-splitting theologians are the death of efficient organization.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 180
I rely on scientific method. On any disputed point there is always one sure answer: Look it up in the Book.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 181
The Bible is the literal Word of God; let there be no mistake about that. But nowhere did the Lord promise us that it would be easy to read.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 181
There is nothing like being barefoot broke to adjust one's mundane values.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 190
Then I became utterly bemused when I first ran across the name of the current President: His Most Christian Majesty, John Edward the Second, Hereditary President of the United States and Canada, Duke of Hyannisport, Comte de Quebec, Defender of the Faith, Protector of the Poor, Marshall in Chief of the Peace Force.
I looked at the picture of him, laying a cornerstone in Alberta. He was tall and broad-shouldered and blandly handsome and was wearing a fancy uniform with enough medals on his chest to ward off pneumonia. I studied his face and asked myself, "Would you buy a used car from this man?"
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 191
Americans, all during their two and a quarter centuries as a separate nation, had missed the royalty they had shucked off. They slobbered over European royalty whenever they got the chance. Their wealthiest citizens married their daughters to royalty whenever possible, even to Georgian princes -- a "prince" in Georgia being a farmer with the biggest manure pile in the neighborhood.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 191/192
[I assume that RAH means the Russian
state of Georgia, not the American state of Georgia. I am certain that had he chosen to point out any shortcomings of the U.S. state of Georgia, he would have gone into much greater detail. --MN]
I'm not sure that I would take a job in the kinging business if it were offered to me; there are obvious drawbacks and not just the long hours.
On the other hand --
Refusing a crown that you know will never be offered to you is sour grapes, by definition.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 192
Can you imagine a vehicle that flies eight miles above the ground? Can you imagine a giant car that moves faster than sound? Can imagine a screaming whine so loud that it makes your teeth ache?
They call this progress.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 196
I am never one of those back-to-nature freaks who sneer at engineering; I have more reason than most people to respect engineering. Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 196
But I had learned the hard way that rules of polite speech in the world in which I had grown up were not necessarily rules in another universe.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 196
[A point, I believe, to be an oblique echo of the quote from George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, where it is said of Brittanicus, "He is a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his island are as the laws of nature." --MN]
"I'm a poor risk."
"Nope, you're a good risk. What the bankers call a character loan, the very best risk there is. Sometime, this coming year, or maybe twenty years from now, you'll run across another young couple, broke and hungry. You'll buy them dinner on the same terms. That pays me back. Then when they do the same, down the line, that pays you back. Get it?"
"I'll pay you back sevenfold!"
"Once is enough. After that you do if for your own pleasure."
--Teamster Steve introducing Alex and Margrethe to the concept of paying forward;
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 208
"When the parade goes by, I'm out for a short beer. That's the story of my life."
--Teamster Steve, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 214
"The simplest explanation is that I've gone crazy and that it's all imaginary -- you, me, Marga, this restaurant, this world -- all products of my brain fever."
"You can be imaginary if you want to, but leave Maggie and me out of it."
--Alexander Hergensheimer and Teamster Steve, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 215
I was baptized a long time ago, when I was too young to have much say in the matter. I'm not a churchgoer, except sometimes to see my friends married or buried. If I was washed clean once, I guess I'm a little dusty by now."
--Teamster Steve, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 216
"You tell me that I am beautiful. But you could be prejudiced. I hope that my appearance is pleasing to other people as well."
"Be serious, Margrethe; we're speaking of your naked limbs. Naked."
"You're saying my legs are bare. So they are. I prefer them bare when the weather is warm. What are you frowning at, dear? Are they ugly?"
"Your limbs are beautiful, my love; I have told you so many times. But I have no wish to share your beauty."
"Beauty is not diminished by being shared."
--Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson to Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 230
"But, Margrethe, nakedness is indecent by its very nature. It inspires lewd thoughts."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 230
"Does seeing my legs cause you to get an erection?"
"Margrethe! "
"Alec, stop being a fub! I asked a simple question."
"An improper question."
"I don't see how that question can possibly be improper between husband and wife. And I will never concede that my legs are indecent."
--Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson to Alexander Hergensheimer,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 231
"But, darling, we're going astray again. The problem is wider than whether or not bare legs are indecent or whether I should have kissed steve goodbye or even whether I must obey you. You are expecting me to be what I am not. I want to be your wife for many years, for all my life -- and I hope to share Heaven with you if Heaven is your destination. But, darling, I am not a child, I am not a slave. Because I love you I wish to please you. But I will not obey an order simply because I am a
wife."
--Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 231
I could say that I overwhelmed her with the brilliance of my rebuttal. Yes, I could say that, but it would not be true.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 231
Ever seen a cat play with a mouse? The mouse never has a chance. If he has even the brains the good Lord gives a mouse, he knows that. Nevertheless the mouse keeps on trying . . . and is hauled back every time.
I was the mouse.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 235
If paranoia consist in believing that the world around you is a conspiracy against you, I had become paranoid. But it was either a "sane" paranoia (if you will pardon the Irishism), or I was suffering from delusions so monumental that I should be locked up and treated.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 237/238
"Chaos does not have rules."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 242
"Alec, a miracle that takes place again and again and again is no longer a miracle; it's just a nuisance."
--Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 248
I opened my mouth and closed it, having found that I had nothing to say.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 252
"Nobody can fool a woman about her husband. When she's lived with him, slept with him, given him enemas and listened to his jokes, a substitution is impossible no matter how much the ringer may look like him. Even an identical twin could not do it. There are all those little things a wife knows and the public never sees."
--Jerry Farnsworth, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 256/257
Mr. Farnsworth seemed to regard any collision avoided by a measurable distance as less than sporting.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 265
In meeting her I learned that five feet two inches is the perfect height for a woman, forty is the perfect age, and that a hundred and ten pounds is the correct weight, just as for a woman's voice contralto is the right register. That my own beloved darling is none of these is irrelevant; Katie Farnsworth makes them perfect for her by being herself content with what she is.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 266
. . . she was dressed in her own beauty, like Mother Eve before the Fall. She made it seem so utterly appropriate that I wondered how I had acquired the delusion that freedom from clothing equals obscenity.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 267
When she had dressed us, there was still clothing on the grass -- hers. I then realized that she had walked to the gate dressed, stripped down there, and waited for us -- "dressed" as we were.
That's politeness.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 268
"Alec, you're in no danger of being stoned; this country isn't some ignorant redneck backwoods. Or not much danger. But I don't want you to be discriminated against or insulted."
--Jerry Farnsworth, on the subject of being a christian in his analog of Texas,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 268
"Alec, our daughter is a good girl and as civilized as one could expect in a teenager. But she is an apprentice witch, a recent convert to the Old Religion -- and, being both a convert and a teenager, dead serious about it. Sybil would not be rude to a guest -- Katie brought her up properly. Besides, she knows I would skin her alive. But it would be a favor to me if you will avoid placing too much strain on her. As I'm sure you know, every teenager is a time bomb waiting to go off."
--Jerry Farnsworth, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 269
"Other day, man in Dallas tried to order Irish whisky. Rode him out of town on a rail. Then they apologized to him. Turned out he was a Yankee and didn't know any better."
--Jerry Farnsworth, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 271
"That's what the cow said to Mrs. Murphy. But the fire burned on."
--Jerry Farnsworth, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 272
That's a conclusion, subject to refutation.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 275
The young man's name was Roderick Lyman Culverson III; he did not manage to catch my name. I have long suspected that the male of our species, in most cases, should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bunghole. Then, at age eighteen, a solemn decision can be made: whether to take him out of the barrel, or to drive in the bung.
Young Culverson gave me no reason to change my opinion -- and I would have voted to drive in the bung.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 276
(see also the entry in Beyond This Horizon and I Will Fear No Evil, 188)
"Alec, I can agree with one thing. The news for the past several months has looked to me like Armageddon. Say tomorrow afternoon. Might as well be the end of the World and Judgment Day, as there won't be enough left to salvage after this one.
--Jerry Farnsworth, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 282/283
"I used to worry about what kind of a world Sybil would grow up in. Now I wonder if she'll grow up."
--Jerry Farnsworth, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 283
"But I can't see proof in the dreams of long-dead prophets; you can read anything into them. Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything. Oh, my church too -- but at least mine is honestly pantheistic. Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything -- just give him time to rationalize it. Forgive me for being blunt."
--Jerry
Farnsworth, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 283
"Well, good luck. But if you do slip, look me up in Hell, will you?"
"I don't know that it will be permitted."
--Jerry Farnsworth and Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 283
I wonder if that first shovelful of dirt hits a corpse with the same shock.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 289
But I had learned long ago, in dealing with legislators, that anyone who tries to keep you from having a witness is bad news.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 300
(What did I know? Nothing. But when it's necessary to bluff, always bluff big.)
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 300/301
"What is it, dear?"
"Nothing. Just Loki having fun with us. Go back to sleep."
--Alexander Hergensheimer to Margrethe Svensdatter Gunderson,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 310
There is an old paradox, Achilles and the Tortoise, in which the remaining distance to your goal is halved at each step. The question is: How long does it take to reach your goal? The answer is: You can't get there from here.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 313
. . . most people cannot see gravestones without thinking about the hereafter.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 315
He had both logic and strength of position on his side; I agreed.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 315
"I admire his courage. Brother Barnaby is betting his reputation that Judgment Day will arrive before it's time to harvest wheat . . . which could be early this year, hot as it is."
"But you think Judgment Day is soon."
"Yes, but I'm not betting a professional reputation on it . . . just my immortal soul and hope of Heaven."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 316
Church music does not have to be good as long as it is sincere -- and loud.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 318
My professor of homelitics pointed out to us once in a workshop session that a congregation imbued with religious fervor has a strong and distinctive odor ("stink" is the word he used) compounded of sweat and both male and female pheromones. "My sons" he told us, "if you assembled congregation smells too sweet, you aren't getting to them. If you can't make 'em sweat, if they don't break out in their own musk like a cat in rut, you might as well quit and go across the street to the papists.
Religious ecstasy is the strongest human emotion; when it's there, you smell it."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 319
"Hellfire and damnation! Not for just a little while but through all eternity! Not some mystical, allegorical fire that singes only your peace of mind and burns no more than a Fourth of July sparkler. This is the real thing, a raging fire, as real as this. [...] The sort of fire that makes a baseburner glow cherry red, then white. And you are in that fire, Sinner, and the ghastly pain goes on and on and it never stops. Never! There's no hope for you. No use asking for a second chance
. . . and your millionth chance. And more. For two thousand years sweet Jesus has been begging you, pleading with you, to accept from Him that for which He died in agony on the Cross to give you. So, you are burning in that fiery Pit, and trying to cough up the brimstone -- that's sulfur, plain ordinary sulfur, burning and stinking, and it will burn your lungs and blister your sinful hide! -- when you're roasting deep in the Pit for your sins, don't go whining about how dreadful it
hurts and how you didn't know it would be like that. Jesus knows all about pain; He died on the Cross. He died for you. But you wouldn't listen and now you're down in that Pit whining."
--Brother Barnaby, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 321/322
"Can there be a better word to describe the twentieth century than 'tribulations'?
"Wars and terrorists and assassinations and fires and plagues. And more wars. Never in history has mankind been tried so bitterly."
--Brother Barnaby, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 324
Do I believe in predestination?
That is a good question. Let's move on to questions I can answer.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 327/328
"Creature, please accept my assurance that any cough your daughter manages to take with her into Heaven will be purely psychosomatic."
--An angel on Judgement Day to a mother worried about her child,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 330
[and continued to quote below]
There were more questions, mostly silly, confirming an opinion I had kept to myself for years; Piety does not imply horse sense.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 330
Measures of time and space become very slippery when one lacks mundane clocks and yardsticks.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 332
I found only two distinct classes in Heaven: angels and humans. Angels consider themselves superiour and do not hesitate to let you know it. And they are indeed superiour in position and power and privilege. Saved souls are second class citizens. The notion, one that runs all through Protestant Christianity and maybe among papists as well, that a saved soul will practically sit in the lap of God -- well, it ain't so! So you're saved and you go to Heaven -- you find at once that you are the new boy on the block, junior to everybody there.
A saved soul in Heaven occupies much the position of a blackamoor in Arkansas. And it's the angels who really rub your nose in it.
I never met an angel I liked.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 337
I don't know how long it took the bus to reach the Throne. In Heaven the light doesn't vary and the weather does not change and I had no watch. It was simply a boringly long time. Boring? Yes. A gorgeous palace constructed of precious stones is a wonderful sight to see. A dozen palaces constructed of jewels can be a dozen wonderful sights, each different from the other. But a hundred miles of such palaces will put you to sleep, and six hundred miles of such palaces of the same is deadly dull.
[...]
New Jerusalem is a city of perfect beauty; I am witness to that. But that long ride taught me the uses of ugliness.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 343
Whoever designed it, the Holy City has a major shortcoming, in my opinion -- and never mind telling me that my presumption in passing judgement on God's design is blasphemous. It is a lack, a serious one.
It lacks a public library.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 344
I have gathered a strong impression that, for most humans, the real problem of an eternity of bliss is how to pass the time.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 346
. . . where R.H.I.P. is the rule, being even a corporal is vastly better than being a private.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 347
My one razor blade was closer to being a saw than a knife by then, but a half hour's patient honing using the inside of a glass tumbler (a trick I had learned in seminary) restored it to temporary usefulness.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 354/355
. . . no saint ever knows that he is one, he has to be told. It is a holy paradox that anyone who thinks he is a saint never is.
--Saint Peter to Saint Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 359
For modern man one of the most troubling aspects of eternity lies in getting used to the slippery quality of time. With no clocks and no calendars and lacking even the alternation of day and night, or the phases of the moon, or the pageant of seasons, duration becomes subjective and "What time is it?" is a matter of opinion, not of fact.
I think I fell longer than twenty minutes; I do not think that I fell as long as twenty years.
But don't risk money on it either way.
--Saint Alexander Hergensheimer concerning his falling from Heaven to Hell, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 367
There was nothing to see but the insides of my eyeballs.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 367
"With patience and plenty of saliva the elephant deflowered the mosquito."
--Alexander Hergensheimer quoting, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 369
"Around me, miracles just happen; I don't do them on purpose."
"Excuses. If I had rabies I'd bite you."
--Bert (the childhood chum) to Saint Alexander, after being turned into a pink monkey,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 373
"Well, . . . Heaven's okay, if you're an angel. It's not a planet; it's an artificial place, like Manhattan."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 373
"Here in Hell, everybody pays up, eventually. Bear in mind that a deadbeat can't even die to avoid his debts."
--Bert (the childhood chum) to Saint Alexander, on procuring credit in Hell,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 374
"My confessor might have looked upon me with lust had I been a choir boy -- as it was, he sometimes snored while I was confessing. Not surprising; my sins were dull, even to me."
--Sister Pat, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 381
"Patty, I didn't even like my mother!"
"Oh. Didn't that cause you trouble at Judgment Day?"
"No. That's not in the rules. It says in the Book that you must honor thy father and thy mother. Not one word about loving them. I honored her, all the full protocol. Kept her picture on my desk. A letter every week. Telephoned her on her birthday. Called on her in person as my duties permitted. Listened to her eternal bitching and to her poisonous gossip about her women friends. Never contradicted her. Paid her hospital bills. Followed her to her grave. But weep I did not. She
didn't like me and I didn't like her."
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 383
I looked at Pat across the table, appreciating her wholesome, girl-scout beauty, with her sprinkle of freckles across her nose, and thought how strange it was that I had ever confused sex with sin. Sex can involve sin, surely -- any human act can involve cruelty and injustice. But sex alone had no taint of sin.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 384
Would Margrethe see it that way?
Well, she had never seemed jealous of me.
How would I feel if she took a vacation, a sexual vacation, such as I had just enjoyed? That's a good question. Better think about it, boy -- because sauce for the goose is not a horse of a different color.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 385
"Sister Mary Patricia, is this another lie?"
"Saint Alexander, I have never lied to you. I've had to hold back some things until I was free to speak, that's all."
--Sister Pat, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 389
"You are trying to make a fool of Me, in front of My gentlemen?"
"No, Your Majesty, I cannot make a fool of You. Only You can do that."
--Alexander Hergensheimer to Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 392
"Tell me, have you ever thought of writing for a living? Rather than preaching?"
"I don't think I have the talent."
"Talent, schmalent. You should see the stuff that gets published."
--Satan to Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 393
[A small example of the deconstructionism in which Heinlein sometimes engaged. --MN]
"Aren't you curious about the offer?"
"Your Majesty, certainly I am. But, if my race has learned one lesson concerning You, it that a human should be extremely cautious in bargaining with you."
"Poor little human, did you really think that I wanted to dicker for your scrawny soul?"
"I don't know what You want. but I'm not as smart as Dr. Faust, and not nearly as smart as Daniel Webster. It behooves me to be cautious."
--Alexander Hergensheimer to Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 393
"Uh . . . is this Texas? Or is it Hell?"
"Matter of opinion."
"Is there a difference?"
--Jerry Farnsworth -- AKA Satan -- and Sybil to Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 399
[This bit of dialogue might be a take on what General Sherman once said about, "If I owned Hell and Texas I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell." --MN]
"Alec, you stubborn squarehead, I lost three bets on you. So here's to you."
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 399
[Offering a toast concerning his failure to bribe Saint Alexander. --MN]
"You're a tough son of a bitch, Alec, so much so that I looked up the bitch you are a son of. A bitch she is and tough she was and the combo of that vixen and your sweet and gentle sire produced a creature able to survive."
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 403
"Son, crying in your drink is bad enough, crying into a hot fudge sundae is disgusting."
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 408
"The Lord God Jehovah is a just God!"
"You never played marbles with him."
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan to Alexander Hergensheimer,
Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 410/411
"Alec, 'justice' is not a divine concept; it is a human illusion. The very basis of the Judeo-Christian code is injustice, the scapegoat system. The scapegoat sacrifice runs all through the Old Testament, then it reaches its height in the New Testament with the notion of the Martyred Redeemer. How can justice possibly be served by loading your sins on another? Whether it be a lamb having its throat cut ritually, or a Messiah nailed to a cross and 'dying for your sins.' Somebody should
tell all of Yahweh's followers, Jews and Christians, that there is no such thing as a free lunch."
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 411
"A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain -- then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?"
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 411
"But the Lord moves in mysterious -- "
"Not mysterious to Me, bud: I've known Him too long. It's His world, His rules, His doing. His rules are exact and anyone can follow them and reap the reward. But 'just' they are not."
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 411
But I could not speak my misgivings aloud, and least of all to the Lord's Ancient Adversary. It was especially upsetting that Satan chose at this moment to have the shape and the voice of my only friend.
Debating with the Devil is a mug's game at best.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 413
"A girls spends fifty years on her back, studying hard. Along comes some slottie who can make chicken and dumplings. It's not fair."
--Sybil, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 414
"You know that verse in the Bible about not suffering witches to live?"
"Exodus twenty-two, eighteen."
"That's the one. The Old Hebrew word translated there as 'witch' actually means 'poisoner.' Not letting a poisoner continue to breathe strikes me as a good idea. But I wonder how many friendless old women have been hanged or burned as a result of a sloppy translation."
--Sybil to Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 415
"Katie, a straight answer, please. Is this Hell? Or is this Texas?"
"Both."
--Katie Farnsworth AKA Rahab to Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 417
"Alec, to be able to read and write is as wonderful as sex. Or almost. You may not fully appreciate what a blessing it is because you probably learned how as a baby and have been doing it ever since."
--Katie Farnsworth AKA Rahab to Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 420
Or perhaps I don't understand at all how such things are done.
Strike out "perhaps" -- I know as much about operations on the God level as a frog knows about Friday.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 422
"To this entity your lord god Jehovah is equivalent to a child building sand castles at a beach, then destroying them in childish tantrums. To Him I am a child too. I look up to Him as you look up to your triple diety -- father, son, and holy ghost. I don't worship this entity as God; He does not demand, does not expect, and does not want, that sort of bootlicking. Yahweh may be the only god who ever thought up that curious vice."
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice,
pg 425
"Don't bow down or offer worship. Just stand your ground and tell the truth. If you die, die with dignity"
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 426
"Mr. Chairman, almost everything about a human creature is ridiculous, except its ability to suffer bravely and die gallantly for whatever it loves and believes in. The validity of that belief, the appropriateness of that love, is irrelevant; it is the bravery and the gallantry that count. These are uniquely human qualities, independent of mankind's creator, who has none of them himself -- as I know, since he is my brother . . . and I lack them too."
--Jerry Farnsworth AKA Satan, Job: A
Comedy Of Justice, pg 428
"Sir, is there not a guild rule requiring artists to be kind in their treatment of their volitionals?"
"No."
"Sir, I must have misunderstood my training."
"Yes, I think you have. There is an artistic principle -- not a rule -- that volitionals should be treated consistently. But to insist on kindness would be to eliminate that degree of freedom for which volition in creatures was invented. Without the possibility of tragedy the volitionals might as well be golems."
--Mr. Chairman Koschei to Jerry Farnsworth, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 429
"This creature has stated its willingness to wash dishes 'forever' in order to take care of her. One may doubt that it realizes just how long a period 'forever' is . . . yet its story does show earnestness of purpose."
--Mr. Chairman Koschei, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 233
A man who is happy at home doesn't lie awake nights worrying about the hereafter.
--Alexander Hergensheimer, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, pg 438
" . . . even if nobody loves him and he suffers from spiritual bad breath."
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 11
"Jake, how does a man get to be fifty years old without acquiring horse sense? Only smart thing that lad ever did was pick a rich mother-in-law."
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 12
"I can't use trained seals; a man has to have the guts to disagree with me, or he's a waste of space. But when a man bucks me, I want him to do it intelligently. "
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 12
"Going to dance at my wake?"
"I don't dance, but you tempt me to learn."
--Jake Salomon to Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 13
"But she's proud, Jake, and I would rather depend on pride than gadgetry."
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 19
"I won't deny that my professional ethics have a little stretch in them -- but I won't be party to anything smelling of bodysnatching, kidnapping, or congress with slavery. Any self-respecting prostitute -- meaning me -- has limits."
--Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 20
"Okay, so you're not God. You can revise your remarks later. What do you know now?"
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 21
"... most people think of money as something to pay the rent. But a money man thinks of money in terms of what he can do with it."
--Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 31
(I can't see why a Latin polysyllable makes me more a lady than a monosyllable with the same meaning.)
--Eunice to Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 118
(Eunice my love, the main difference between the young and the old, the cause of the so-called Generation Gap -- a gap in understanding that has existed throughout all time -- is that the young simply cannot believe that the old ever were young . . . whereas to an old person his youth is something that happened just last week, and it annoys the hell out of him when someone in effect denies that this old duffer ever owned a youth.)
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No
Evil, pg 120
(A baby is a baby. Babies are to love and take of and that's what this whole bloody mess is about, else none of it makes sense.)
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 124
(Eunice, I wore horns with dignity and always kept suspicions to myself. Just as well -- as all my wives contributed to my cornute state. Horns? Branching antlers! The husband who expects anything else is riding for a fall. But I never had illusions about it, so it never took me by surprise. No reason why it should, as I got the best parts of my own training from married women, starting clear back in my early teens. I think that happens in every generation. But horns make a man's head
ache only when he's stupid enough to believe that his wife is different -- when all the evidence he has accumulated should cause him to assume the opposite.)
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 125
(But what I was saying was this: A man who takes his fun where he finds it, then marries and expects his wife to be different, is a fool.)
--Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 125
"You can call yourself 'Joan' -- or 'Johann' -- or 'Miniver Cheevy' -- and that is your name as long as your purpose is innocent. And pronounce it as you like. Knew of a case once of a man who spelled his name 'Zautstinksi' and pronounced it 'Jones' and went to the trouble of publishing the odd pronunciation as a legal notice -- although he did not have to; a name may be pronounced in any fashion its owner chooses."
--Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 162
"So I'll be a sideshow freak again, and who cares? A nine-day wonder lasts only a couple of days now; they wear out faster than they did when I was a kid."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 165
(see the entry Introduction to The Worlds of ~, 20, in the file on Heinlein's personal writings)
"Jake you told me it was impossible to spend my income. If my butler is black-marketing two-thirds of what he buys for me and pocketing the proceeds -- and he always has -- then he's anxious to keep his job. Which means that he has to please me. Jake, can you think of a cheaper way to buy the nearest thing to loyalty that can be bought? Let him steal. Do not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain. The good horse must always get his lump of sugar."
"Bad precedent. Corrupts the country."
"The country is corrupt. But 'it is the only game in town'; we have no choice. The problem is always how to live in a decadent society. Jake, I want you to live here. I hope you will live here. It will make me feel happy and safe for you to be under the same roof. But don't worry about my reputation -- and Winnie is here to protect yours. Most certainly don't think about such trivia as household expenses; just close your eyes and sign. But don't hesitate to chew out Cunningham if
the service is less than perfect; that's the price he must pay for the privilege of swindling me."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 167
(Nobody knows how memory works except that everyone is sure he knows and that all the others are fools.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 174
(Egg feathers, Eunice.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 181
(As you pointed out, sex is not a sport, it's for being happy.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 181
"If I'm not me then I'm dead and it would be worth being broke to hear my will read and see the looks on the faces of my loving descendants when they discover they wind up with trivial incomes that aren't even tax free. Jake, every rich man wants to hear his will read -- and I may get the chance."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 185
"Madam, simply because it suits me to be informal in my chambers do not think that this is not a court in session or that I would not find you in contempt. I would enjoy it."
--Judge McCampbell, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 186
"Mrs. Seward, your counsel cautioned you. If you don't heed his caution, this Court is capable of nailing you into a barrel and letting you speak only when I say to pull out the bung."
--Judge McCampbell, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 188
(see also the entry for Beyond This Horizon and Job: A Comedy Of Justice, 276)
" -- but there are more ways of killing a cat than by buttering it with parsnips."
--Judge McCampbell, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 189
"I don't know how much law you know -- "
"Just what has rubbed off in the course of a long and evil life. I depend on experts."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 200
"I don't know, but I always assume that my opponent might cheat if I fail to cut the cards."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 203
"As for me, I hold to the old-fashioned ideal that a courtroom is where the Sovereign is present in person, dispensing equity and justice to all . . . not bread-and-circuses for the rabble."
--Judge McCampbell, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 207
"And why is it that when the parade goes by I'm always out for a short beer?"
"The O.B. damaged your head with his forceps. That's why they had to make a lawyer out of you."
--Judge McCampbell, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 210
" -- bloodstream swimming with hormones and gonads the size of gourds, is the way it feels -- "
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 224
"Of the inventing of gods there is no end. And almost always anthropomorphic."
--Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 227
"The idiot box is for idiots. Why do you look at it?"
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 245
[Meant as a rhetorical question in this case, not an insult. --MN]
"Jake, I don't expect to find God by staring into my belly button. But it does work . . . and it's much better than forcing your body with drugs."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 250
[About yoga meditation, not a commentary on religion; this time. --MN]
(Running a feudal enclave in the midst of a nominal democracy isn't easy, Eunice.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 266
[Concerning invoking the imperatives of command and the principles of leadership in a society where they are largely unknown. Compare the way an elected official who invokes the same is condemned as authoritarian or autocratic. This is one more example of the failings of a warm body democracy and the political correctness that derives from
Bread and Circuses. --MN]
(I have a high opinion of human nature. I think it will prevail in spite of all the efforts by the wowsers to suppress it.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 308
[Compare This I Believe in Grumbles From The Grave, pages 163 and 603. While this sentiment is actually rarely expressed in his works, it is nonetheless a central theme for very nearly every one of them. At least in this editor's never, ever humble opinion. --MN]
(Sex, whatever else it is -- much else! -- is an athletic skill. The more you practise, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 311/312
[cross-reference with either The Number or Sail Beyond Sunset. --MN]
"The old Romans knew what they were doing when they tossed living victims to the lions; most people are fairly decent -- but collectively they love blood."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 323
"The worst he can do is strip me of my money. Which I wouldn't mind; I've discovered that more money than is needed for current bills is a burden."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil,
"He's damned by his own I.Q. -- leave him to nature."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 353
(see also Time Enough For Love, 189)
(It's high odds that if the Greeks had a word for it they have a price for it.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 363
[The they under discussion being an anonymous group of people, not the Greeks. --MN]
Charlie was better dead and his death did not rate one crocodile tear. Ten thousand human beings had died around the globe in the hour since his death -- why weep over a worthless one.
--I Will Fear No Evil, pg 370
" . . . I think this is a cereal morning. Some decent, quiet, well brought-up cereal that doesn't snap, crackle, or pop. That's all. Unless you know a remedy for a hangover."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 376
( . . . female jujitsu -- let them have their own way until it turns out your way.)
--Eunice to Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 279
"Look, cuddly, don't be impressed. After a certain point money isn't money, it's just bookkeeping figures or magnetized dots in a computer."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 407
"Joe says that all an artist can teach is technique. He says creativity can't be taught and that each artist has his own sort. If he has any--Joe thinks that most people who call themselves 'artists' haven't any. He calls 'em 'sign painters' and adds that he would rather be a good sign painter than a fraud who calls himself an artist."
--Gigi Branca, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 411
(see also Stranger In A Strange Land,
238 and 326, and I Will Fear No Evil, 434)
" -- never said that poor is better than rich, Gigi; it is not. But both 'rich' and 'poor' have shortcomings -- somewhere between is probably best, if you can get off the treadmill at that point."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 415
"He's a craftsman as well as an artist. Well, maybe I don't know what an artist is but I know what a craftsman is and I respect craftsmen. Too few of them in this decadent world."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 434
(see also Stranger In A Strange Land, 238 and 326, and I Will Fear No Evil, 411)
(Boss, you're making a big mistake.) (If so I'm making it. I never make little mistakes -- just big ones.)
--Eunice and Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 437
"I am ninety-five years old -- much older than you are -- able to afford a dozen bastards if it suits me -- and it may -- and wealthy enough to tell the world to go pee up a rope."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 437
(Boss, that's awfully close to the truth -- but it sounds like a whopper.) (It is the truth, Eunice; I worded it most carefully. That is the second best way to tell a lie -- tell the truth so that it sounds like a whopper.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 439
(see also Time Enough For Love, 22, and Starman Jones, 159)
(Lying is a fine art; it is learned only through long practice.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 439
(see also Time Enough For Love, 22)
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"Boats and ships are female because they're beautiful, lovable, expensive -- and unpredictable."
--Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 452
"I do know that if a man acquires too much money, presently it owns him instead of his owning it."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 454
"Darling, a new born baby is as useless a thing as one can imagine. It isn't even pretty -- except to its doting parents. It does not pay its own way and it is unreasonably expensive. It takes twenty to thirty years before the investment begins to pay off and in many -- no most -- cases it never does pay off. Because it is much easier to support a child than to bring one up to amount to anything."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 455
"The best hope of our race. If that baby [the Lunar Colony] lives, the human race lives. If we let it die -- and it is vulnerable for a few more years -- the race dies too. Oh, I don't mean H-bombs. We're faced with far greater dangers than H-bombs. We've reached an impasse; we can't go on the way we're headed -- and we can't go back -- and we're dying in our own poisons. That's why that little Lunar colony has got to survive. Because we can't. It isn't the threat of war, or
crime in the streets, or corruption in high places, or pesticides, or smog, or 'education' that doesn't teach; those things are just symptoms of the underlying cancer. It's too many people. Not too many souls or honks or thirds -- just...too many. Seven billion people sitting in each other's laps, trying to take in each other's washing, picking each other's pockets. Too many. Nothing wrong with the individual in most cases -- but collectively we're the Kilkenny Cats, unable to do
anything but starve and fight and eat each other."
--Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 456
"Jake, I could worry about Smith Enterprises when I was running it. I can worry now about sixty odd people and make sure they're each all right in so far as money can insure it. But nobody can solve things for seven billion people. They won't let you. You go nutty with frustration if you try."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 460
"Eunice, I suspect that our tragedy has been played out endless times. It may be that an intelligent race has to expand right up to its disaster point to achieve what is needed to break out of it planet and reach for the stars. It may always -- or almost always -- be a photo finish, with the outcome uncertain until the very last moment. Just as it is with us. It may take endless wars and unbearable population pressure to force feed a technology to the point where it can cope with space. In
the universe, space travel may be the birth pangs of an otherwise dying race. A test. Some races pass, some fail."
--Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 461
"Isn't there a third sort?"
"Eh? Oh, you mean faithful wives. Oh, certainly. So I've heard. But in my twenty years of general practice, much of it divorce cases, I encountered so few of that sort -- none I felt certain about -- that I can't venture an opinion. Wives technically faithful form so small a part of the sample that I can't evaluate them. People being what they are, a rational man should be satisfied if his meals are on time and his dignity not affronted."
--Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No
Evil, pg 463
"Not so trusting now, is all. Don't trust too much, you don't get your ass burned."
"Yet you don't seem cynical. Tom, I think the major problem in growing up is to become sophisticated without becoming cynical."
"That's over my head, Counselor. I just think people are okay, mostly -- even that silly skipper -- if you don't strain 'em more than they're built for."
--Tom Finchley and Jake Salomon, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 473
"Underneath I am a very old man, almost three times your age, dear... and I've seen everything and no shock can truly be a shock to me. Death is an old friend; I know him well. I lived with him, ate with him, slept with him; to meet him again does not frighten me -- death is as necessary as birth, as happy in its own way."
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 488
(Seven billion people makes Earth a terribly lonely place . . . but there are only a few thousand on Luna, and if we try, we can get to know all of them and love most of them.)
--Johann (Joan Eunice) Smith, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 505
"This is a frontier, son. I'm not running down your specialty -- but this is not the place for it. Here we set bones, take out appendixes, and try to keep contagious diseases from racing through the colony. But when it comes time to die, we die -- you, me, anybody -- and get out of the way of the living."
--Doctor Frankel to Doctor Garcia, I Will Fear No Evil, pg 510