Top 40 Robert Silverberg Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We are born by accident into a purely random universe.”

— Robert Silverberg

2. “Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.”

— Robert Silverberg

3. “When you know that something is dying inside you, you learn not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment.”

— Robert Silverberg

4. “I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.”

— Robert Silverberg

5. “Know this, and know it well: time is never wasted. Wherever we go, whatever we do, everything is an aspect of education. Even when we don’t immediately grasp the lesson.”

— Robert Silverberg

6. “Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll be of good cheer.”

— Robert Silverberg

7. “It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.”

— Robert Silverberg

8. “Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.”

— Robert Silverberg

9. “To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.”

— Robert Silverberg

10. “Never pass by a chance to shut up.”

— Robert Silverberg

11. “Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing’s unthinkable once somebody’s thought it.”

— Robert Silverberg

12. “Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.”

— Robert Silverberg

13. “Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.”

— Robert Silverberg

14. “Because people fight most fiercely when they dare not admit even to themselves that their cause is unjust.”

— Robert Silverberg

15. “When you enslave a black man, you enslave yourself as well, for now you are bound to him as surely as he is bound to you, and your character is shaped by his bondage as surely as his own is. Make the black man servile, and in the same process you make yourself tyrannical. Make the black man quiver in fear before you, and you make yourself a monster of terror.”

— Robert Silverberg

16. “Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.”

— Robert Silverberg

17. “Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.”

— Robert Silverberg

18. “What’s personality anyway? A mask of emotions, superimposed on the body and the intellect.”

— Robert Silverberg

19. “On the contrary, Mr. Wiggin. The tax laws are designed to trick people into paying more than they have to. That way the rich who are in the know get to take advantage of drastic tax breaks, while those who don’t have such good connections and haven’t yet found an accountant who does are tricked into paying ludicrously higher amounts. I, however, know all the tricks.”

— Robert Silverberg

20. “It’s a cultural matter. They take pride in their unpride. It reflects their lack of status. Bottom... of the bottom of the human world, and they know it, and they don’t like it, and the squalor is like a badge of nonstatus for them. Saying, you want us to be filth, we’ll live in filth too. Reveling in it. Wallowing in it. If we’re not people, we don’t have to be tidy...”

— Robert Silverberg

21. “There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.”

— Robert Silverberg

22. “Death was the only question that contained its own answer, and when you asked the question and had the answer you were gone, you were nothing.”

— Robert Silverberg

23. “Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.”

— Robert Silverberg

24. “Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.”

— Robert Silverberg

25. “There are other themes for poetry besides immersion in the Will, my friends. The love of person for person, the joy of defending one’s home, the wonder of standing naked beneath the fiery stars – ” The invader laughed. “Can it be that Earth fell so swiftly because its only poets were poets of acquiescence to destiny?”

— Robert Silverberg

26. “If I am just as stupid when I am twenty as I was when I was two, if I am just as stupid when I am a hundred as I was when I was fifty, then I am not doing my job. I am occupying space and time to no purpose, and I might just as well have been a lump of rock.”

— Robert Silverberg

27. “To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can’t be done subtly or delicately.”

— Robert Silverberg

28. “In dealing with people who are enormously touchy on matters of honor and pride, I think it’s wisest to be accommodating to their needs, especially if they’re eight feet tall and provide you with your wages.”

— Robert Silverberg

29. “One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.”

— Robert Silverberg

30. “Where’s the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?” “There isn’t any. That’s why I say the universe stinks.” “We have no freedom at all?” “The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.”

— Robert Silverberg

31. “I don’t think I can even imagine what a culture that’s been developing steadily for a billion years ought to be like. Disembodied electrical essences, maybe. Ghostly creatures flitting in and out of the eighth, ninth, and tenth dimensions. Cosmic minds that know all, perceive all, understand all. Maybe.”

— Robert Silverberg

32. “Who could not return from a visit to Jack Vance’s world, without feeling that he had been somewhere unique, that he had experienced things unavailable in our mundane world?”

— Robert Silverberg

33. “Gods are not granted the power of choice; it is the price and the wonder of their godhead.”

— Robert Silverberg

34. “She was strikingly ignorant, but he had known that from the start. What he had not known was how quickly her ignorance would cease to seem charming and would begin to seem contemptible.”

— Robert Silverberg

35. “My temperament is not inclined toward more self-promotion than is absolutely necessary for my professional well-being.”

— Robert Silverberg

36. “I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?”

— Robert Silverberg

37. “Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.”

— Robert Silverberg

38. “The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.”

— Robert Silverberg

39. “Part of the prejudice thing is that the victim has to be somebody weaker than you in numbers, but somebody you secretly admire or fear.”

— Robert Silverberg

40. “Your pain pained me.”

— Robert Silverberg

41. “He was only now outgrowing his playboy phase, groping his way out of frivolity the way others might grope their way out of atheism.”

— Robert Silverberg

42. “He was looking for a vehicle of purpose, for a vessel to contain his formless ambitions and abilities.”

— Robert Silverberg

43. “Earth fell,” said the Surgeon, “because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it.”

— Robert Silverberg

44. “That is the truth. I know now that we need not fear death, if we have done our tasks. And when we cease to fear death, there is no death. That is the truest truth I know: There is no death.”

— Robert Silverberg