Quote #16

'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? That lemming drive you're talking about is there - but there's another kind of drive, another kind of force that's working a against it. Or else there wouldn't still be any people and there wouldn't be the words to have this conversation and-' She paused, looked down at herself. 'And I wouldn't be here to say them.'

More from Spider Robinson

  1. Call it: joy. The thing like pleasure that you feel when you've done a good thing or passed up a real tempting chance to do a bad thing. Or…
  2. Now I can say that I have sampled the spectrum of the pleasure system at both ends - none and all there is - and I think the rest of my lif…
  3. Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure - which, given his…
  4. God is an iron: and that's a hot one.
  5. 'God is an iron,' I said. 'Did you know that?' I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I fail…
  6. It's always coldest before the warm.
  7. I've tried it with men and women and boys and girls, in the dark and in the desert sun, with people I cared for and people I didn't give a …
  8. As Bob Dylan forgot to say, 'To live outside the law, you must be lucky.'

All Spider Robinson quotes