Algis Budrys

“Can I drive you down to your house?”And you can take that phrase and carve it on Humanity’s headstone, Fay thought bitterly, but did not reply.

— Algis Budrys

Williamson threw his hands carefully up to heaven and snorted again. Apparently, everything Fay said served to confirm some judgment of mankind on his part.

— Algis Budrys

“You look like any other brainless jackanapes,” he mused, “but apparently there’s some gray matter left in your artfully coiffed skull after all.”

— Algis Budrys

There are various uses for time, and I have better ones than this.

— Algis Budrys

Young man, you’re living proof that our basic policy is right. I wouldn’t trust an ignoramus like you with the information required to cut his throat.

— Algis Budrys

Amnesia was the price of immortality.

— Algis Budrys

Wasn’t being a dilettante the result of an inner conviction that you were too good for routine living?

— Algis Budrys

There has to be an end somewhere, he thought. Each thing has to end, or there will never be any room for beginnings.

— Algis Budrys

“Armies!” he burst out. “The day Freemen organize to invade another area is the day they stop being Freemen. They become soldiers, loyal to the army and their generals. They lose their identification with their homes and families. They become a separate class—an armed, organized class of military specialists no one family can stand against. And on that day, freedom dies for everybody.

— Algis Budrys

It isn’t given to very many men to have their dreams come true in their lifetimes.

— Algis Budrys

It hadn’t had to take the form of this terrible bubble. It might as easily have been a sudden sharp burst behind his eyes or a slower, subtler gnawing at his vitals. But he’d known it was coming, as every man knows and tries to forget it is coming.

— Algis Budrys

Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he had looked forward to.

— Algis Budrys

Does it not seem to you, Justice Joyce, that this series of statistics might well occur without the intervention of any Divine Will whatsoever?

— Algis Budrys

There’re limits to what civilized people can bring out into the open, no matter how savagely they can speculate.

— Algis Budrys

That was the way things worked out: you got a certain fair share of good breaks from life, and you had no right to expect things your way every time.

— Algis Budrys

Of course, you have to remind yourself that you might be seeing things that were never there. You might be maneuvering your memories to bring them into line with what you’d want them to be. You can’t be sure you’re not just daydreaming.

— Algis Budrys

Claire threw her head and laughed. “There are all kinds of men. The only kind that’re worth anyone’s time are the ones I can’t mangle the first time out.”

— Algis Budrys

There are the people in this world who act, and the people who scheme. The ones who act get things done, and the ones who scheme try to take credit for it. You must know that as well as I do.

— Algis Budrys

Look, if I could guarantee what the results were going to be, I wouldn’t need a research program!

— Algis Budrys

A man is a phoenix, who must be reborn from his own ashes, for there is no other like him in the universe. If the wind stirs the ashes into a clumsy parody, then the phoenix is dead forever. Nothing we know of can bring you back.

— Algis Budrys

The universe has resources of death which we have barely begun to pick at.

— Algis Budrys

The dead must not rise—they undermine everything their dying created.

— Algis Budrys

Never try to reason with a man who can see the blade swinging for his head.

— Algis Budrys

Always lobbying for his own emotions, he was the perfect man for a job the administration had tacitly committed to ineptitude.

— Algis Budrys

Man, is it wrong to miss being young and sure of yourself?

— Algis Budrys

“Smart isn’t ‘Can you do it, is it good to do?’ Smart is ‘Can you make ’em believe what you’re doing is real?’ And real is ‘Can you get financing for it?’”

— Algis Budrys

That was a classic maniacal farrago, and it boils down to his not being able to understand the world. It wasn’t necessary to count the contradictions after the first one.

— Algis Budrys

Loss of dignity is after all one of the basics to a good punchy gag.

— Algis Budrys

I wonder if time-traveling cultures are playing with us. I wonder if they process our history for entertainment values.

— Algis Budrys

It was understood on occasions of this sort that crew technicians are too busy to stay, since it had long ago been discovered that even one cameraman at a buffet was worth a horde of locusts, and tended to make awkward small talk.

— Algis Budrys

“I’m not frightened.”“None of us are ever frightened. Now and then, we’d just like more time to plan our responses.”

— Algis Budrys

I’m just an information processor like any other living thing.

— Algis Budrys

You know, even more than playing chess, I dislike dealing with self-righteous chess players.

— Algis Budrys

“The world is full of confusing coincidences.”“And a man’s mind insists on making patterns from random data.”

— Algis Budrys

It’s good for us; hot breath on your heels is what keeps you on your toes.

— Algis Budrys

“Even so, we’re the only animal whose signals can’t be trusted by its own kind.” He smiled. “Except for thee and me, of course.”

— Algis Budrys

I don’t know...but then, if God had intended Man to think, He would have given him brains, I suppose.

— Algis Budrys

The horse is a stubborn, dirty, stupid animal that reminds me of a sheep. Its only use is to embody the wings a man feels within him, and to do this it lathers and sweats, defecates and steps in badger holes.

— Algis Budrys

“Bribes,” Michaelmas said. “They always go to bribes when they’re not sure they’re on top, and coercion when they are. That’s all they know. They really don’t believe anyone would help them just on their own merits.”

— Algis Budrys

“I hate acting on probability.”“You go to your church and I’ll go to mine.”

— Algis Budrys

“I—ah—have some idea.”“No. Another form of dialectical antagonism.”

— Algis Budrys

I do what seems best—I live, I let live; so far I’ve done well. I don’t see why I should act like a predator, simply because I’m in a predatory society. I’m a human being, I’m myself—if I make my life something vicious, who’ll give me another if, too late, I regret what I’ve done?

— Algis Budrys

He wondered, as he often had during his life, at people’s ability to think so intricately and to still be wrong.

— Algis Budrys