Spider Robinson famous quotes

Quite frankly, I don't like you humans. After what you all have done, I find being 'inhuman' a compliment.
-- Spider Robinson

#Done #Like You #Compliment

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.
-- Spider Robinson

#Thinking #Littles #Imbeciles

Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.
-- Spider Robinson

#Pain #Law #Joy

…when writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence…in love, never settle…value yourself first and this will help you to value others…life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest…everyone in the world is different, and that’s ok…
-- Spider Robinson

#Life Is Short #Writing #Never Settle

You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.
-- Spider Robinson

#Lying #People #Track

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.
-- Spider Robinson

#Iron #Felons #Gluttony

Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don't ever piss one off.
-- Spider Robinson

#Secret #Library #World

Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.
-- Spider Robinson

#Pain #Joy

honesty is hard work.
-- Spider Robinson

#Honesty #Hard Work

I'm going to live forever, or die trying !
-- Spider Robinson

#Death #Suicide #Forever

The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.
-- Spider Robinson

#Dirty #Tired #Sunday

In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system!
-- Spider Robinson

#Jobs #Educational #Night

Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends.
-- Spider Robinson

#Fall #Dark #Mad

Man, you're no smarter than me. You're just a fancier kind of stupid.
-- Spider Robinson

#Stupid #Men #Kind

Time didn't pass; it tailgated.
-- Spider Robinson

Librarians are like crack dealers when it comes to hooking small children.
-- Spider Robinson

#Children #Cracks #Librarian

To be human : to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.
-- Spider Robinson

#Life #Advice #Faces

It took me better than a quarter century to learn, the hard way, that hard work at something you want to be doing is the most fun that you can have out of bed . . . to learn that the smart man finds ways to make everything he does be work; to learn that "leisure" time is truly pleasurable (indeed tolerable) only to the extent that is its subconscious grazing for information with which to infuse newer, better work.
-- Spider Robinson

#Fun #Smart #Hard Work

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?
-- Spider Robinson

#Couple #Smart #Thinking

Anger is always - always - fear in disguise.
-- Spider Robinson

#Disguise

A beginning is the end of something, always.
-- Spider Robinson

#Ends

Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you've all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale - way cool.
-- Spider Robinson

#Fun #Whales #Ideas

It's always coldest before the warm.
-- Spider Robinson

The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. I'm no longer nearly so sure. The last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars.
-- Spider Robinson

#Men #Apollo #Mars

God is an iron... and that's a hot one.
-- Spider Robinson

#Iron #Hot

Art takes whatever - and as long as - it takes.
-- Spider Robinson

#Art #Long

Euphemisms are for the differently brained.
-- Spider Robinson

#Euphemism

And I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has been selling as entertainment since 1939.
-- Spider Robinson

#Land #Perception #Age

there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured - if you have someone to share it with.
-- Spider Robinson

#Heart #Secret #Mind

...I know good design when I fail to trip over it.
-- Spider Robinson

#Design #Failing #Good Design

Sexual intercourse vests no property rights.
-- Spider Robinson

#Rights #Vests #Intercourse

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.
-- Spider Robinson

#Forever #Trying #Asking

We are all time travelers moving at the speed of exactly 60 minutes per hour.
-- Spider Robinson

#Crazy #Moving #Speed

Information can't be put in any container that isn't leaky.
-- Spider Robinson

#Teaching #Information

Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.
-- Spider Robinson

#Pain #Joy #Entropy

And there's this place called college! I mean, they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don't care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street!
-- Spider Robinson

#Mean #College #Games

Mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening ... and those who find it thrilling. The rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history.
-- Spider Robinson

#Two Sides #Rupture #Threatening

Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak human, not the other way around.
-- Spider Robinson

#Fiction #Way #Robots

If you've lived a bad life, they send you to Hell. But if you've been truly wicked, they give you a tour of Heaven first...
-- Spider Robinson

#Giving #Heaven #Wicked

And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?
-- Spider Robinson

#Pants #Pairs #Ass

The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.
-- Spider Robinson

#Reality #Psychosis #Patterns

To all the Callahan's Places there ever were or ever will be, whatever they may be called — and to all the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!
-- Spider Robinson

#Fool #Too Late #May

We did make use, from time to time, of candles, neckties, scarves, shoelaces, a little water-color paintbrush, her hairbrush, butter, whipped cream, strawberry jam, Johnson’s Baby Oil, my Swedish hand vibrator, a fascinating bead necklace she had, miscellaneous common household items, and every molecule of flesh that was exposed to air or could be located with strenuous search.
-- Spider Robinson

#Baby #Air #Hands