John Sladek > Quotes

“As the semantic engineer, your job is naming the parts and tightening nuts and bolts. I suggest you get back to your office and do that - right now!”
― John Sladek, The Steam-Driven Boy

“Laugh if you will... They laughed at all great ideas and inventions. They laughed at nitrous oxide.”
― John Sladek

“R-4 got stuck on the First Law. "Can anyone really protect a human being from all harm whatever?" it thought. "No. It is inevitable that all humans must be injured, contract illnesses and ultimately die. The future can only be averted for humans who are already dead. Ergo..." It took a dozen cops to subdue R-4, after his blood orgy in a department store (83 dead, none injured). ”
― John Sladek

“Yeah but Father, is that what you meant by God being a paradox? How he was so pleased to get a chance to nail his Son there that he even gave up his plan to fry the whole world in Hell?”
― John Sladek

“The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.”
― John Sladek

“History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken”
― John Sladek, Roderick at Random

“Music is the music of all music, and I am jealous.”
― John Sladek, Roderick at Random

“But then a counter-sect arose, embracing persons who thought they believed in Darwin’s novel theory. What they actually believed in was Reformed Darwinism, a religious and social theory combining ‘survival of the fittest’ with ‘Devil take the hindmost’. The important thing was to be a survivor. Take care of your tribe and your territory. Be selfish. God helps those who help themselves.”
― John Sladek, Tik-Tok

“When Barthemo Beele was two years old, he was trained to use a little potty stool that was kept in a cupboard with a hanging cloth in front of it. This little secret, with its aura of shame, interested him so keenly that he had to lift the cloth and look at it a dozen times a day. To this single episode, he later felt, all of his curiosity could be traced. For little ‘Themo’ developed an unfortunate habit of lifting hanging cloths to peer under them. And after he had lifted the skirt of a visitor, a bishop’s wife, ‘Themo’ received his first sound whipping. Yet, as if his motto were Video, ergo sum, Barthemo went on lifting hanging cloths and looking under them, and was unable to resist doing so. He would lift the corner of a tablecloth and stare at the table’s legs, fascinated, flushed with guilt and a strange pleasure he could not name. He grew to a skinny, secretive kid, addicted to tattling, to forming, with friends, secret clubs, and to writing what he hoped were dirty words on fences: FUDGE, SHAME, ORGANISM, and especially LOVE. One day by chance he lifted a blanket and found a couple of organisms making love: his mother and a man not his father. Barthemo hastened to tell his father, who thanked him for his information by spanking him and locking him in his room for a day. When he decided the boy had learned his lesson, the elder Beele relented and let him out – but on condition that he mind his own business. Barthemo actually did have a business at this time, which was selling information to the police. For nickels, dimes and quarters, he would tell them which members of which secret clubs were stealing bike tyres from gas stations and magazines from drugstores. Later, for larger sums, he told them about car thefts and burglaries. This continued well into high school, when his duties as a school reporter took up most of his free time. The police gave him a present of money when he left for college, and told him he was the ‘Best little”
― John Sladek, The Reproductive System

“Albert Payson Terhune!”
― John Sladek, The Reproductive System

“LOOKING FOR TOOLS?’ The pupils of LOOK’s eyes were looking at the blank eyes of TOOLS. ‘SEE OUR SAWS’.”
― John Sladek, The Reproductive System

“stoolie we ever had.’ Someday, he thought, as the shay rolled along Boulevard Mohammed V, someday he would write a book, a defence of police informers: They Call Me Stoolie. ‘Why is it,’ he would write, ‘that those who risk their lives exposing murderers, thieves, dope peddlers and every crooked and vicious element of our society, that those who do their duty as citizens (for not to report a crime is misprision), are looked on by society with loathing and distaste?’ Looking at Beele, Suggs saw a skinny, nervous-looking young man on whom an eyeshade, with a press card in the band, seemed a needless affectation.”
― John Sladek, The Reproductive System

“Whether or not we could retain some control of the machines, assuming that we would want to, the nature of our activities and aspirations would be changed utterly by the presence on earth of intellectually superior beings.’ M. L. MINSKY in Scientific American”
― John Sladek, The Reproductive System

“very good. Now we’ll give you an Indian burn, and then twist your arm until you holler uncle.’ Smilax demonstrated”
― John Sladek, The Reproductive System

“The next break came from statute law, namely from the Equal Science Act. This says that “no scientific theory, hypothesis, principle, law definition, program, procedure or statement may be taught in any California school while in conflict with any other theory etc arising from any religious teaching, unless both theories etc are given equal emphasis as equally valid”. The idea was to give Genesis equal time with evolution as a creation theory, but it soon got out of hand, with Ptolemaic Anabaptists insisting on equal time with the Copernican theory, and finally with the Christian Flat Earth Assembly (Swiss Synod), whose representatives brought a suit against a California teacher for mentioning satellites. These are no satellites orbiting a flat earth, they pointed out, and so anyone mentioning satellites should also express doubt about their existence. A group of astronomers filed a countersuit, claiming that if satellites were unreal, their livelihood was in jeopardy. Moreover, satellite communications could not work and could not therefore be licensed by the government. ‘The state legislature had to meet quickly and draft an amendment to the California Comsat Act of 1998. In effect, the amendment hedged on the question of the reality of satellites by considering them as “sentient devices”. Thus if satellites believed in their own existence, they had a right to be real. Of course this opened up the whole question of freedom of religious belief for robots”
― John Sladek, Tik-Tok

“Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware Of giving your heart to a dog to tear’ KIPLING”
― John Sladek, The Reproductive System