Spider Robinson Quotations

Never attribute to malice, that which can be reasonably explained by stupidity.

Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.

Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you've all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale - way cool.

A beginning is the end of something, always.

The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. I'm no longer nearly so sure. The last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars.

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased; thus do we refute entropy

Everyone deserves to die. God seems to think so.

If you've lived a bad life, they send you to Hell. But if you've been truly wicked, they give you a tour of Heaven first...

Anger is always - always - fear in disguise.

It took me better than a quarter century to learn, the hard way, that hard work at something you want to be doing is the most fun that you can have out of bed . . . to learn that the smart man finds ways to make everything he does be work; to learn that "leisure" time is truly pleasurable (indeed tolerable) only to the extent that is its subconscious grazing for information with which to infuse newer, better work.

Librarians are like crack dealers when it comes to hooking small children.

Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.

Euphemisms are for the differently brained.

And I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has been selling as entertainment since 1939.

To all the Callahan's Places there ever were or ever will be, whatever they may be called — and to all the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!

The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.

And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?

The whole world turns upside down in ten years, but you turn upside down with it.

Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep.

She danced because she needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.

Time didn't pass; it tailgated.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

It's always coldest before the warm.

God is an iron... and that's a hot one.

Art takes whatever - and as long as - it takes.

In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system!

there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured - if you have someone to share it with.

We are all time travelers moving at the speed of exactly 60 minutes per hour.

I'm going to live forever, or die trying !

The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.

Sexual intercourse vests no property rights.

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.

Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends.

Information can't be put in any container that isn't leaky.

We did make use, from time to time, of candles, neckties, scarves, shoelaces, a little water-color paintbrush, her hairbrush, butter, whipped cream, strawberry jam, Johnson’s Baby Oil, my Swedish hand vibrator, a fascinating bead necklace she had, miscellaneous common household items, and every molecule of flesh that was exposed to air or could be located with strenuous search.

...I know good design when I fail to trip over it.

Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak human, not the other way around.

Mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening ... and those who find it thrilling. The rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history.

And there's this place called college! I mean, they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don't care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street!

honesty is hard work.

Quite frankly, I don't like you humans. After what you all have done, I find being 'inhuman' a compliment.

To be human : to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.

Man, you're no smarter than me. You're just a fancier kind of stupid.

You know what gives me the courage to keep on living? The courage to love myself a little? It's having a whole bunch of friends who really give a goddamn. When you share pain, there's less of it, and when you share joy, there's more of it.

You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.

Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don't ever piss one off.

…when writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence…in love, never settle…value yourself first and this will help you to value others…life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest…everyone in the world is different, and that’s ok…

Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.