Interviewer: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work? Parker: Need of money, dear.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
The two greatest characters in the 19th century are Napoleon and Helen Keller. Napoleon tried to conquer the world by physical force and failed. Helen tried to conquer the world by power of mind — and succeeded!
"Let them call me a rebel and welcome it. Fore I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul"
You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.
As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.
We have trained them [men] to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
"This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely."
Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
Trying to learn about the future from science fiction is like trying to learn about love from romance novels.