The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about ...where they are going next.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space--it will seem... increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it: we "make th...ings up." This is our trade. I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismis...s names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity--their links with their dead and the unborn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It ...dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a... set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »