James Blish > Quotes

“She was right. Peace was the way.
She was right. But at the wrong time.”
― James Blish

“I will be the first. As of tonight, I renounce my citizenship in the United Nations, and my allegiance to the Shelter state. From now on I will be a citizen--a citizen of no country but that bounded by the limits of my own mind. I do not know what those limits are, and I may never find out, but I shall devote my life to searching for them, in whatever manner seems good to me, and in no other manner whatsoever.
You must do the same. Tear up your registration cards. If you are asked your serial number, tell them you never had one. Never fill in another form. Stay above ground when the siren sounds. Stake out plots; grow crops; abandon the corridors. Do not commit any violence; simply refuse to obey. Nobody has the. right to compel you, as non-citizens. Passivity is the key. Renounce, resist, deny!”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“[T]he end cannot justify the means; but if there are no other means, and the end is necessary...”
― James Blish, Cities in Flight

“The boundary between the real and the unreal had been let down in Foote's mind, and between the comings and goings of the cloud-shadows and the dark errands of the ghosts there was no longer any way of making a selection. He had entered the cobwebby borderland between the human and the animal, where nothing is ever more than half true, and only as much as half true for the moment.

("There Shall Be No Darkness")”
― james blish, Zacherley's Vulture Stew

“I for one refuse to believe that an enterprise so well conceived, so scrupulously produced, and so widely loved can stay boneyarded for long.
And I have 1,898 letters from people who don't believe it either.”
― James Blish, Spock Must Die!

“True, most of the people he had known personally were pleasant people who were far from short either of money or good will -- people who would not hesitate to help someone in trouble if they could, or thought they could. By the same token, most of the fiction he had read had been about fantastically selfish, unwashed people without a grain of human kindness even toward themselves, who seemed to be distracted from prolonged acts of suicide only to strike out at the people around them. Between the two, he struck a rough sort of balance.”
― James Blish, Welcome to Mars

“The omelette tasted like flannel.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“I expect that in the long run, when we get right down to the fundamental stuff of the universe, we’ll find that there’s nothing there at all—just nothings moving no-place through no-time. On the day that that happens, I’ll have God and you will not—otherwise there’ll be no difference between us.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“Let us unlearn everything we know only by rote, go back to the beginning, learn all over again.”
― James Blish, The Thing in the Attic

“Maybe God is on the side of the werewolves.”
― James Blish, Get Out Of My Sky

“I don't see why my belief in a God you can't accept is any more rarefied than Mike's vision of the atom as a-hole-inside-a-hole-through-a-hole. I expect that in the long run, when we get right down to the fundamental stuff of the universe, we'll find that there's nothing there at all--just nothings moving no-place through no-time. On the day that that happens, I'll have God and you will not--otherwise there'll be no difference between us.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“But it will happen anyhow. I only wish I’d lived a more human life than I did. But it happened the way it happened, and so there’s no more to say.’ ‘I wish I could believe,’ Estelle said, ‘that there will be no sorrow in the universe I make.’ ‘Then create nothing, my dear,’ Gifford Bonner said. ‘Stay here. Creation means sorrow, always and always.’ ‘And joy,’ Estelle said. ‘Well, yes. There’s that.”
― James Blish, Cities in Flight

“Then I’ll wind it up as fast as I can,” Wagoner said. “What it all comes to is that the whole structure of space flight as it stands now is creaking, obsolescent, over-elaborate, decaying. The field is static; no, worse than that, it’s losing ground. By this time, our ships ought to be sleeker and faster, and able to carry bigger payloads. We ought to have done away with this dichotomy between ships that can land on a planet, and ships that can fly from one planet to another.”
― James Blish, Cities in Flight

“The whole question of using the planets for something—something, that is, besides research—ought to be within sight of settlement. Instead, nobody even discusses it any more. And our chances to settle it grow worse every year. Our appropriations are dwindling, as it gets harder and harder to convince the Congress that space flight is really good for anything. You can’t sell the Congress on the long-range rewards of basic research, anyhow; representatives have to stand for election every two years, senators every six years; that’s just about as far ahead as most of them are prepared to look. And suppose we tried to explain to them the basic research we’re doing? We couldn’t; it’s classified! “And above all, Seppi—this may be only my personal ignorance speaking, but if so, I’m stuck with it—above all, I think that by now we ought to have some slight clue toward an interstellar drive. We ought even to have a model, no matter how crude—as crude as a Fourth of July rocket compared to a Coupling engine, but with the principle visible. But we don’t. As a matter of fact, we’ve written off the stars. Nobody I can talk to thinks we’ll ever reach them.”
― James Blish, Cities in Flight

“The smokes had the reputation of being nonaddicting, which for the most part they were—but they were certainly habit-forming, which is quite a different thing, and not necessarily less dangerous.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“We inhabit two universes, then, One is the universe inside our skulls - our viewpoint universe, as it were.”
― James Blish, Spock Must Die!

“[H]er spare strange beauty was not that of a woman, nor even of a statue, but that of the Platonic absolute of which all beauty is but a shadow in a cave, cast by the Fire beyond fire.”
― James Blish, Doctor Mirabilis

“[A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“Courage was doing what you were afraid to do.”
― James Blish

“They seemed greatly concerned for our safety - so concerned that they wanted to brain us.”
― James Blish, Star Trek: The Classic Episodes, Volume 1

“I've spoken the truth. The truth can't be unsaid.”
― James Blish, The Thing in the Attic

“Ruiz-Sanchez did not believe that the hand of God would reach forth to pluck to salvation men who were involved in such a project as Cleaver's, but he was equally convinced that his should not be the hand to condemn any man to death, let alone to an unshriven death.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“[A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
The residuum was faith.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“There is wanting the unobtainable, and there is the obtaining of desire, and the greatest of these is the wanting, especially since the object of desire usually exists only in some alternate reality, to be mocked by actuality.”
― James Blish, Cities in Flight

“When on the last night of his lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in that hollow of mosses where there was the most dimness, he knew in his blood that on the morrow, when he awoke into his doom as a thinking creature, he would be old with that age which curses those who have never even for an instant been young. Tomorrow he would be a thinking creature, but the weariness was on him tonight....”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience