Childhood's End Quotes
"If I had had any doubts about Karellen before, that banished them - even though that order has caused me more trouble than anything else he's ever done!"
"The greatest change a suddenly-awakened Rip Van Winkle would have noticed was a hushed expectancy, a mental glancing-over-the-shoulder, as mankind waited for the Overlords to show themselves and to step down from their gleaming ships."
"The details of the World Federation have been out for a month now. Has there been a substantial increase in the seven percent who don’t approve of me, or the twelve percent who Don't Know?"
"The Plaza de Toros was full when the matadors and their attendants began their processional entry. Everything seemed normal; the brilliant sunlight blazed harshly on the traditional costumes, the great crowd greeted its favorites as it had a hundred times before."
"I've watched him carefully this last week, and have deliberately avoided helping him. On the whole he's done very well - but he's not the man to take your place."
"You may be correct. Possibly the motives of the Overlords are good - according to their standards, which may sometimes be the same as ours. But they are interlopers: we never asked them to come here and turn our world upside down, destroying ideals - yes, and nations - that generations of men have fought to protect."
"Whether or not there's anything supernormal about this, it works. Personally, I think there's a purely mechanical explanation."
"Remember man is not alone; near man is country of others."
"You realize, of course, that there's no such thing as a truly one-way glass. It's simply a matter of arranging the lights."
"All political problems can be solved by the correct application of power."
"No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time."
"As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams."
"Man was, therefore, still a prisoner on his own planet. It was a much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before."
"When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure."
"Knowledge was power—and he was the only man on Earth who knew the origin of the Overlords."
"I have made calculations based on what we know about the Stardrive, and using the firmly established results of the Relativity theory."
"No human eyes have ever seen this sight before. You are looking at your own Universe, the island galaxy of which your Sun is a member, from a distance of a million light years."
"We’re ruled by a council of eight directors, representing production, power, social engineering, art, economics, science, sport, and philosophy."
"Your race had shown a notable incapacity for dealing with the problems of its own rather small planet."
"The gulf between two technologies can easily become so great that it is—lethal."
"It’s a device for hindering communication between artist and audience."
"It was an impossible coincidence. NGS 549672 must be the home of the Overlords."
"This was something that the Overlords, who had mastered most but not all the quirks of human psychology, had not anticipated."
"I shall be the first man ever to leave the solar system."
"Fortunately, human beings are extraordinarily resilient: it takes a pretty bad upbringing to do permanent damage."
"The main difference between us and the British in India was that they had no real motives for going there —no conscious objectives, that is, except such trivial and temporary ones as trade or hostility to other European powers."
"It’s an ideal we don’t all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important."
"There are powers of the mind, and powers beyond the mind, which your science could never have brought within its framework without shattering it entirely."
"Our races have much in common —that is why we were chosen for this task."
"The supreme secret we kept from you was our purpose in coming to Earth."
"The human race was drawing slowly nearer to the abyss —never even suspecting its existence."
"The Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe."
"Our potentialities are exhausted, but yours are still untapped."
"We are still trying to study them, but we never enter their land or even send our instruments there."
"The world was his. Everything he needed —all the material possessions anyone could ever desire— were his for the taking."