34 Quotes by George R. Stewart

During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.

It had been a great thing, in those Old Times, to be an American. You had been deeply conscious of being one of a great nation. It was no mere matter of pride, but also there went with it a profound sense of confidence and security in life, and a comradeship of millions.

Yes,” he said, “but we are on the ground here; this is our place; he comes breaking in; he must adapt himself to us; not we to him.

As we must always remember, the most important freight that a road carries may be neither household goods, nor livestock, nor munitions of war – but ideas!

Though the centuries have passed since Koheleth looked upon all things and found them fickle as wind, yet still we know little of what goes to the making of a man – least surely of all, why usually there issue forth only those who see what is, and why rarely, now and then, there comes forth among them the chosen one, Child of the Blessing, who sees not what is, but sees what is not, and seeing thus what is not, imagines also what may be. Yet without this rare one all men are as beasts.

Between the plan and the fulfillment lies always the hazard: heartbeat flutters, knife flashes, horse stumbles, cancer grows, more subtle foes invade.

For he realized that a man should make peace with himself, even though all conditions changed, and that a man should face the question of whether in his life he had satisfied the ideas which he had built up within himself as to what he should be, and that all this was not a matter of priests and religion but of a man himself.