Top 40 Harry Harrison Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I always get the best advice from myself.”

— Harry Harrison

2. “Every day should be unwrapped as a gift.”

— Harry Harrison

3. “Darling, the history of medicine is the history of the violation of natural law. The Church – and that includes the Protestant as well as the Catholic – tried to stop the use of anesthetics because it was natural law for a woman to have pain while giving birth. And it was natural law for people to die of sickness. And natural law that the body not be cut open and repaired.”

— Harry Harrison

4. “Let me tell you, I may look old but that’s just because of my age.”

— Harry Harrison

5. “The Welfare ration cards took care of everything, everything that kept you alive and just alive enough to hate it.”

— Harry Harrison

6. “One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and burned it and it’s gone now.”

— Harry Harrison

7. “They are living symbols of the state of decay of our culture, just as this wasteland is a vastly more important symbol, that is why I am here.”

— Harry Harrison

8. “Captain Chung Pei-fu of the Koumintang Army. A career soldier who had dedicated his life to war and who had never fought a battle.”

— Harry Harrison

9. “We no longer attempt to guide cultures towards what we consider a beneficial goal. There are too many goals, and from our limited vantage point it is hard to tell the good ones from the bad ones. All we do now is try to protect the growing cultures, give a little jolt to the stagnating ones – and bury the dead ones.”

— Harry Harrison

10. “It is amazing the things people will believe if you catch them early enough.”

— Harry Harrison

11. “In all cultures mothers try to shape sons in their female image. For their own good. The boys resist – and the rite of passage helps this resistance. There is always symbolism involved, because symbols are a way to represent the myths that underlie every culture.”

— Harry Harrison

12. “Ever see a plant with teeth – that bite? I don’t think you want to. You’d have to be on Pyrrus and that means you would be dead within seconds of leaving the ship.”

— Harry Harrison

13. “We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment...”

— Harry Harrison

14. “Snorting with disgust, Meta stamped out.”

— Harry Harrison

15. “A pushed-back cap had the crossed slide-rule symbol of ship’s computer man.”

— Harry Harrison

16. “So they think wrong. Am I to blame because the world is full of fatheads? You know well enough that birth control has nothing to do with killing babies. In fact it saves them. Which is the bigger crime – letting kids die of disease and starvation or seeing that the unwanted ones don’t get born in the first place?”

— Harry Harrison

17. “I have been followed by enough police robots to know by now how indestructible they are. You can blow them up or knock them down and they keep coming after you; dragging themselves by one good finger and spouting saccharine morality all the while.”

— Harry Harrison

18. “If you want the little luxuries of life you have to be prepared to pay for them.”

— Harry Harrison

19. “How can you kill something that never existed? We’re all winners in the ovarian derby, yet I never heard anyone crying about the – if you will excuse the biological term – the sperm who were the losers in the race.”

— Harry Harrison

20. “Men should be spoiled, it makes them easier to live with.”

— Harry Harrison

21. “There isn’t a person alive who has not been afraid at one time or another. It is only the brave man who can feel fear and still go forward.”

— Harry Harrison

22. “Mankind invents cultures – and cultures invent myths to justify and explain their existence. Prominent among these are the myths and ceremonies of the rites of passage for boys. The passage from boyhood to manhood. This is the time when the boy is separated from his mother and the other women. In some primitive cultures the boys go and live with the men – and never see their mothers again.”

— Harry Harrison

23. “The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way.”

— Harry Harrison

24. “We got a plague of people, a disease of people infesting the world. We got more people who are living longer. Less people have to be born, that’s the answer. We got death control – we got to match it with birth control.”

— Harry Harrison

25. “I went to sleep with the tape player whispering softly in my ears such ego-building epigrams as, ‘You are better than everyone else and you know it, and people who don’t know it had better watch out,’ and ‘They are all fools and if you were in charge things would be different, and why aren’t you in charge, it’s easy enough.”

— Harry Harrison

26. “Two, four, six, eight – Welfare rations come too late. Three, five, seven, nine – Medicare is still behind.”

— Harry Harrison

27. “This is the start of a new era, equal rights for men and women.” She smiled at him and slid into her chair without another word. Damn, he thought, for another look like that I’d give her the whole thing.”

— Harry Harrison

28. “Gratitude you can’t expect, a salary you can. It’s a job.”

— Harry Harrison

29. “Though he knew that he was young, at this moment he felt that his days were almost over. He could see the future and the rest of his life as clearly as if he had already lived it, because it would be unchanging and no different from the lives of all the others around him.”

— Harry Harrison

30. “In 1950 the United States – with just 9.5 per cent of the world’s population – was consuming 50 per cent of the world’s raw materials.”

— Harry Harrison

31. “Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That’s the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they’re dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it’s good enough for me. Bango, dead.”

— Harry Harrison

32. “Women! They insist on mixing everything up together. Perhaps they operate better that way, but it is very hard on those of us who find that keeping emotion and logic separate produces sounder thinking.”

— Harry Harrison

33. “But doing something means that people must change, make an effort, use their minds, which is what most people do not like to do.”

— Harry Harrison

34. “Skop screamed when they all looked at him, shouted it was all a trick, and had to be clubbed unconscious when he attacked the bowmen. Understanding had come to Pyrrus.”

— Harry Harrison

35. “It is very hard to be a hypocrite if you aren’t trained for it.”

— Harry Harrison

36. “Liberation by destruction was on the way! We would free them even if we had to kill them all to do it!”

— Harry Harrison

37. “That was foolish of me,” she said coldly while she reloaded the gun. “I don’t need a gun. If I had to kill him, I could do it with my bare hands.” “I love you, too,” Jason smiled at her.”

— Harry Harrison

38. “Like you, my boy, I am a Scientific Humanist and feel no need for the aid of the supernatural.”

— Harry Harrison

39. “All laws and ideas are historical and relative, not absolute. They are relevant to their particular time and place.”

— Harry Harrison

40. “Like all of the other sciences, we have found out that the more we know, the more there is to know.”

— Harry Harrison

41. “I am seventy-five years old and I reached this venerable state by staying out of trouble, keeping my mouth shut and not volunteering, just like I learned in the Army.”

— Harry Harrison

42. “Morning sickness and bank robbery doesn’t mix well.”

— Harry Harrison

43. “The first and most obvious difference would be the absence of Iceland, for these volcanic islands mark the place where the meteor struck and penetrated to the mantle below.”

— Harry Harrison

44. “Once a plan is made it must always be followed to the letter. It should only be changed if outside circumstances change. Man is a rationalizing animal and needs training in order to become a rational one.”

— Harry Harrison