What is superstition , but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb.

Fritz Leiber

Categorized in : People Hate Magic

Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.

Fritz Leiber

chilly servitude warm

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.

Fritz Leiber

laughter motivation dark

I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!

Fritz Leiber

cat organization people

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.

Fritz Leiber

fun rooms world

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

Fritz Leiber

communication mean people

The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright.

Fritz Leiber

government suffering fall

What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?

Fritz Leiber

upset remember might

There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.

Fritz Leiber

hungry vampire blood

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.

Fritz Leiber

corridors movement lows

The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That's why they're the gods! I told you they were devils.

Fritz Leiber

wealth devil wonder

Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy , looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.

Fritz Leiber

pebbles half stones

Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.

Fritz Leiber

cosmos conspiracy assuming

Ningauble shrugged. You're a hero. You should know.

Fritz Leiber

humorous should hero

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself's the beginning of all love.

Fritz Leiber

care loneliness people

Things are different from what I thought. They're much worse.

Fritz Leiber

different

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

Fritz Leiber

crisis

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

Fritz Leiber

drunkards equal madmen

Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.

Fritz Leiber

devil purpose may

There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky.

Fritz Leiber

something-new sky night

A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.

Fritz Leiber

scientist healthy coincidence