Science-fiction Quotes

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...

No, when the time comes, I’m sure I’ll kill just like everybody else. I can’t go down without a figh...

It's better to die in pursuit of your dreams than to live a life without hope.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors ...

We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it.

And that's what I don't like about magic, Captain. 'cos it's *magic*. You can't ask questions, it's ...

But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions.

A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solut...

We are now in a position to determine just what sort of science fiction story this really is.

If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about a...

Necessity is the mother of invention, which probably explains why invention’s father left home on th...

A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their c...

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to d...

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words eve...

The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ign...

Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.

[H.G. Wells said] that his method was "to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausib...

I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I kno...

The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.

Was he leaving home, or going home?

To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.

Fish and visitors stink after three days.

I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their...

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the l...

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is ...

The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his...

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same...

All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent w...

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

The king was pregnant.

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is no...

On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has f...

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or...

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has ...

...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ...

He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traff...

There is power in controlling something that can do so much damage-in controlling something, period.

I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.

And how will this come to pass?' He paused and lowered his voice. ' In the same way all change comes...

What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give the, Christ, h...

Science Fiction has always attracted more talented writers than it could reward adequately.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing ...

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about ...

We will be one step down from the Creator," she said, her olive-hued face tightening into an express...

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all ...

Yesterday, here in the middle of the City, I saw a wolf turn into a Russian ex-gymnast and hand over...

The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.

People who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with ...

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to ...

Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be...

All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he...

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers lightly spread, and with a barely audible click,...

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound...

Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory...

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the ...

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case...

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic s...

But a thought swarmed in me; what if he, this yellow-eyed being – in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of...

Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again. But their si...

And I'm thinking about the old man. He'll be pounding on the glass right about now... or maybe not n...

...She wasn't anyone special. She wasn't that brave, that clever or that strong. She was just somebo...

The state exists for man,not man for the state.The same may be said ofscience. These are old phrases...

He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with posses...

Stability,” insisted the Controller, “stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence ...

Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.

The mind is the reality. You are what you think.

Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critic...

I love analogies! Let’s have one.Imagine that you dearly love, absolutely crave, a particular kind o...

The single word that directs a person’s fate and ultimately the fates of those she comes in contact ...

I’ve been thinking about it, since you said it,” said Seivarden. No, said Mercy of Kalr. “And I’ve c...

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. Bu...

And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsi...

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with simil...

How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth," when it is clearly "Ocean.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible

Sometimes, during the lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He wo...

Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the ...

(...)Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes,...

Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this ...

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attain...

..the happy hum of humanity.

In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not ...

Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anyth...

Imagine that every man’s mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality...

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, ...

Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'M...

In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame...

The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, w...

Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact strid...

Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other.

Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. C...

Once, I believed that space couldhave no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared t...

The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times. The formula for telling a powerful ...

If you can read the book and say, ‘Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!’ That’s Military Science Fiction.” (Br...