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Robert Sheckley war ein US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller. Er gilt als einer der humorvollsten Erzähler der Science-Fiction-Literatur. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. Juli 1928 – 9. Dezember 2005
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Robert Sheckley: Zitate auf Englisch

“And a great longing overcame him, a desire to be finished with desire, to forego pleasure and pain, to quit the petty modes of achievement and failure, to have done with distractions, and get on with the business of life, which was death.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 17 (p. 83)

“Evil,” the priest said, after he had settled comfortably into Barrent’s best chair, “is that force within us which inspires men to acts of strength and endurance. The worship of Evil is essentially the worship of oneself, and therefore the only true worship. The self which one worships is the ideal social being; the man content in his niche in society, yet ready to grasp any opportunity for advancement; the man who meets death with dignity, who kills without the demeaning vice of pity. Evil is cruel, since it is a true reflection of the uncaring and insensate universe. Evil is eternal and unchanging, although it comes to us in the many forms of protean life.”

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Robert Sheckley buch The Status Civilization

Quelle: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 6 (pp. 28-29)

“He shook his head violently, pulled himself together and swallowed a stiff dose of Infradex, a drug designed to alleviate drug reactions. Within seconds he was his old, normally depressed self. This cheered him considerably, and he left the hut in a mood teetering on the edge of equanimity.”

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Robert Sheckley

Quelle: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 15 (p. 125)

“On Omega, the law is supreme. Hidden and revealed, sacred and profane, the law governs the actions of all citizens, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high. Without the law, there could be no privileges for those who made the law; therefore the law was absolutely necessary. Without the law and its stern enforcement, Omega would be an unthinkable chaos in which a man’s rights could extend only as far and as long as he personally could enforce them. This anarchy would mean the end of Omegan society; and particularly, it would mean the end of those senior citizens of the ruling class who had grown high in status, but whose skill with a gun had long passed its peak.
Therefore the law was necessary.
But Omega was also a criminal society, composed entirely of individuals who had broken the laws of Earth. It was a society which, in the final analysis, stressed individual endeavor. It was a society in which the lawbreaker was king; a society in which crimes were not only condoned but were admired and even rewarded; a society in which deviation from the rules was judged solely on its degree of success.
And this resulted in the paradox of a criminal society with absolute laws which were meant to be broken.”

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Robert Sheckley buch The Status Civilization

Quelle: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 11 (pp. 50-51)

“It was the college conservatives who had almost succeeded in electing John Smith to the Presidency of the United States during the last election. The fact that Smith had been dead for twenty years had not dampened their ardor; quite the contrary, many considered this the candidate’s best quality.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Journey Beyond Tomorrow

Quelle: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 8 “How Joenes Taught, and What He Learned” (pp. 70-71)

“All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth or falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 14 (p. 70)

“Nature abhors a vacuum, and I don’t like it much either.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 32 (p. 153)

“All his studies had been for extraterrestrial exploration. There was no place for him on Earth; and now he was barred from space.”

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Robert Sheckley buch The Status Civilization

Quelle: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 8 (p. 41)

““You might say that,” Flynn said, thus avoiding an outright lie, since anyone might say anything whether it was true or not.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 8 (p. 44)

“Love is a wonderful game which begins in fun and ends in marriage.”

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Robert Sheckley

Quelle: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 15 (p. 131)

““And do not think,” Manisfree said, “that we absolve ourselves from blame in this situation. Although we teachers purport to know more than other men, we have usually chosen to remain aloof from public life. Practical, hardheaded men of the world have always frightened us; and those men, in their hardheaded way, have brought us to this.”
“Nor is aloofness our only failure,” said Hanley of Anthropology. “Let me point out that we have taught—badly! Our few promising students became teachers, thus insulating themselves as we had. The rest of our students sat through the sleep-provoking drone of our lectures, eager only to depart and take their places in a mad world. We did not touch them, Joenes, we did not move them, and we did not teach them to think.”
“In fact,” said Blake of Physics, “we did quite the contrary. We managed to equip most of our students with a definite hatred of thinking. They learned to view culture with the greatest suspicion, to ignore ethics, and to consider the sciences solely as a means of making money. This was our responsibility and our failure. The outcome of that failure is the world.””

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Robert Sheckley buch Journey Beyond Tomorrow

Quelle: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 9 “The Need for the Utopia” (p. 74)

“One moment’s inattention, and the long expected death came at last—unexpectedly! In that agonized moment, sprawled helpless upon the uncaring ground, Polletti realized that no preparation for one’s own death is possible. Death has had too much experience in catching men off guard, in piercing their attitudes and reducing their poses.”

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Robert Sheckley

Quelle: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 15 (p. 126)

“Would you define Good for me, Citizen Abbot?”
“Certainly. Good is that force within us which inspires men to acts of conformity and subservience. The worship of Good is essentially the worship of oneself, and therefore the only true worship. The self which one worships is the ideal social being: the man content in his niche in society, yet ready to creatively advance his status. Good is gentle, since it is a true reflection of the loving and pitying universe. Good is continually changing in its aspects, although it comes to us in the… You have a strange look on your face, young man.”

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Robert Sheckley buch The Status Civilization

“I’m sorry, Citizen Abbot. I believe I heard that sermon, or one very much like it.”
Quelle: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 27 (p. 115)

“Still, no matter how commonplace, one’s death is the most interesting event of one’s life.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Immortality, Inc.

Quelle: Immortality, Inc. (1959), Chapter 1 (p. 1)

“Quite in vain did several lawyers point out to him that, if justice really existed, there would be no need for law and lawmakers, and thus one of mankind’s noblest conceptions would be obliterated, and an entire occupational group would be thrown out of work. For it is the essence of the law, they told him, that abuses and outrages should exist, since these discrepancies served as proof and validation of the necessity of law, and of justice itself.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 6 (pp. 28-29)

“But Joenes then made a speech which was a beauty, and I cannot recall it word for word, but the idea was that laws are made by man and thus must partake of the evil nature of man, and that true morality lies in following the true dictates of the illuminated soul.
“A Commie, huh?””

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Robert Sheckley buch Journey Beyond Tomorrow

said the lead cop.
Quelle: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 2 “Lum’s Meeting With Lety Barrera Joenes” (p. 18)

““I feel no moral compunction in the slightest at my so-called crime. If a man cannot retain control of his own body, then he deserves to lose it. I have observed, during a long and varied lifetime, that men will give their bodies to any rogue who asks, and will enslave their minds to the first voice that commands them to obey. This is why the vast majority of men cannot keep even their natural birthright of a mind and body, but choose instead to rid themselves of those embarrassing emblems of freedom.”
“That,” Detective Urdorf said, “is the classic apologia of the criminal.”
“That which you call a crime when one man does it,” Kraggash said, “you call government when many men do it. Personally, I fail to see the distinction; and failing to see it, I refuse to live by it.””

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 30 (pp. 141-142)

“In a way it made no difference, since nothing is permanent except our illusions.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 33 (pp. 156-157)

“Well, no sense crying over unspilt blood,” the Prize Clerk said. “If we took full account of our eventualities, we’d soon run out of eventualities for us to take full account of.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Dimension of Miracles

Quelle: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 3 (p. 23)

“For love, as he knew it, was an aberration, a form of temporary insanity, a short-lived state of autosuggestion.”

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Robert Sheckley

Quelle: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 15 (p. 132)

“Thus action serves as anodyne, whereas contemplation is revealed as the most direct form of involvement, and therefore much shunned by men.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 24 (p. 112)

““It is the principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a housebuilding business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called ‘religion,’ and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But I’ll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse.”
“What’s that?” Carmody asked.
“It’s the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, ‘Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.’ The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.”
“I think I see what you mean,” Carmody said.
“I’ve made it too complicated,” Maudsley said. “There’s a much simpler reason for avoiding religion.”
“What’s that?”
“Just consider its style—bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans—fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can’t believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?””

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Robert Sheckley buch Dimension of Miracles

Quelle: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 13 (pp. 88-89)

“We have propounded our beliefs in various ways, and according to various doctrines. Often we have aroused the passions of men to murder and war. This was perfectly proper, since it brought the problems of morality and religion to their highest and most exquisite pitch, and gave many complicated matters for us theologians to talk about.
We argued always, and we published our various dissenting opinions. But we argued like lawyers in a court, and nobody in his right mind listens to a lawyer. Those were the days of our pride, and we never noticed that men had ceased to pay attention to us.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Journey Beyond Tomorrow

Quelle: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 6 “Joenes and the Three Truck Drivers” (p. 50)

“The only thing to think over was Me, of course. And the real problem about Me was, What was I supposed to do? Was I meant to be nothing but God? I had tried the God business and found it too limited. It was a job for a simple-minded egomaniac. There had to be something else for me to do—something more meaningful, more expressive of my true self. I’m convinced of it! That is my problem, and that is the question I ask of you: What am I to do with myself?”

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Robert Sheckley buch Dimension of Miracles

Quelle: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 7 (p. 53)

““Time devours our feeble mortality, leaving us with but the sour residue of memory.”
Marvin nodded. “Yet this ineffable and ungraspable quantity,” he replied, “this time which no man may possess, is in truth our only possession.””

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 24 (p. 110)

“For the question inevitably remains, is Polletti’s admission of fear a magnificent conquest of the unconquerable, or a mere admission of the inadmissable?”

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Robert Sheckley

Quelle: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 2 (p. 26)

“Rome has an ambiance, puerile yet unmatchable. Rome hints at the possibility of becoming the main actor in the drama of one’s own life. (The hint is false, of course; but the stolid northern cities do not even possess the hint.)”

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Robert Sheckley

Quelle: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 2 (pp. 19-20)

““Do you have any papers for Will Barrent?”
“None,” the lawyer said. “His case is in different hands. I’m afraid it might not be completely processed until after the Games are over.”
“But I’ll probably be dead then,” Barrent said.
“That, I can assure you, won’t stop the papers from being properly served,” the fat lawyer said proudly. “Dead or alive, you will retain all your rights.””

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Robert Sheckley buch The Status Civilization

Quelle: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 18 (p. 77)

“Corpses shouldn’t be forced to answer questions. Death was man’s ancient privilege, his immemorial pact with life, granted to the slave as well as the noble. Death was man’s solace, and his right. But perhaps they had revoked that right; and now you couldn’t evade your responsibilities simply by being dead.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Immortality, Inc.

Quelle: Immortality, Inc. (1959), Chapter 2 (p. 7)

“Marvin did not give way to despair. He gave way instead to anger, which was a much healthier emotion, though equally unproductive.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Mindswap

Quelle: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 6 (p. 28)

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