Top 60 Clifford D. Simak Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth .”

— Clifford D. Simak

2. “A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”

— Clifford D. Simak

3. “Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don’t know if it even exists.”

— Clifford D. Simak

4. “If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.”

— Clifford D. Simak

5. “Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.”

— Clifford D. Simak

6. “I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.”

— Clifford D. Simak

7. “We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe.”

— Clifford D. Simak

8. “Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.”

— Clifford D. Simak

9. “These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.”

— Clifford D. Simak

10. “It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.”

— Clifford D. Simak

11. “There was almost a fairy quality to this place, he thought. The far look and the clear air and the feeling of detachment that touched almost on greatness of the spirit. As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it.”

— Clifford D. Simak

12. “The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.”

— Clifford D. Simak

13. “What is a bow and arrow? It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war. It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering. It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.”

— Clifford D. Simak

14. “Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.”

— Clifford D. Simak

15. “We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.”

— Clifford D. Simak

16. “Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.”

— Clifford D. Simak

17. “Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology.”

— Clifford D. Simak

18. “This is the very center of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of everything.”

— Clifford D. Simak

19. “Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology anymore. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already – a political system that broke down under its own weight.”

— Clifford D. Simak

20. “What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?”

— Clifford D. Simak

21. “The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.”

— Clifford D. Simak

22. “When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe.”

— Clifford D. Simak

23. “And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past – except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.”

— Clifford D. Simak

24. “A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river – but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself – a thing that went on caring.”

— Clifford D. Simak

25. “It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species.”

— Clifford D. Simak

26. “I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned with where we, as a race, may be going and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme – if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one.”

— Clifford D. Simak

27. “Delectable,” Ulysses said. “Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.”

— Clifford D. Simak

28. “Squatted beside the fire, with the warmth of it upon his face and hands, he felt a smug contentment that seemed strangely out of place – the contentment of a man who had reduced his needs to the strictly basic – and with the contentment came a full-bodied confidence that was just as out of place.”

— Clifford D. Simak

29. “Could that have been what happened to the human race – a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?”

— Clifford D. Simak

30. “He needed sun and soil and wind to remain a man.”

— Clifford D. Simak

31. “A yellow leaf fluttered down from overhead and settled in his lap, a clear, almost transparent yellow against the brownness of the robe. He moved to brush it off and then he let it stay. For who am I, he thought, to interfere with or dispute even such a simple thing as the falling of a leaf. He.”

— Clifford D. Simak

32. “It’s just a bow and arrow, but it’s not a laughing matter. It might have been at one time, but history takes the laugh out of many things. If the arrow is a joke, so is the atom bomb, so is the sweep of disease laden dust that wipes out whole cities, so is the screaming rocket that arcs and falls then thousand miles away and kills a million people.”

— Clifford D. Simak

33. “It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were smart and quick and at times compassionate and even understanding, but they failed lamentably in many other ways.”

— Clifford D. Simak

34. “For it was authority that turned men suspicious and stern-faced. Authority and responsibility which made them not themselves, but a sort of corporate body that tried to think as a corporate body rather than a person.”

— Clifford D. Simak

35. “It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one another to the very edge of space.”

— Clifford D. Simak

36. “That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star. Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were people.”

— Clifford D. Simak

37. “We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good.”

— Clifford D. Simak

38. “With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing.”

— Clifford D. Simak

39. “If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry – yours and mine – back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.”

— Clifford D. Simak

40. “But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that.”

— Clifford D. Simak

41. “My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over.”

— Clifford D. Simak

42. “The walls cried out to him. And voices cried out as well from the shadow of the past. He stood and listened to them, and now a strange thing struck him. The voices were there, but he did not hear the words.”

— Clifford D. Simak

43. “Here, in this waiting room, one could see a cross section of them – the hoppers, the creepers, the crawlers, the wrigglers, and rollers that came from the many planets, from so many stars. Earth was the galactic melting pot, he thought, a place where beings from the thousand stars met and mingled to share their thoughts and cultures.”

— Clifford D. Simak

44. “I’m just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly.”

— Clifford D. Simak

45. “We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques – that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than any race, alone, could hope of accomplishing.”

— Clifford D. Simak

46. “He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences. With.”

— Clifford D. Simak

47. “And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.”

— Clifford D. Simak

48. “University politics,” declared Oop, “doesn’t care about liberal traditions or any other kind of traditions.”

— Clifford D. Simak

49. “But man had changed. He had lost the old knowledge and old skills. His mind had become a flaccid thing. He lived from one day to the next without any shining goal. But he still kept the old vices – the vices that had become virtues from his own viewpoint and raised him by his own bootstraps. He kept the unwavering belief that his was the only kind, the only life that mattered – the smug egoism that made him the self-appointed lord of all creation.”

— Clifford D. Simak

50. “Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.”

— Clifford D. Simak