ŷ������

“Rufinus was an orator and a lawyer, a master of civil administration and agenda. It was because of him that the Eastern Empire—Byzantium—became a bureaucracy for a thousand years; and lived on because its administration had become too intricate to die—though there are those who say that its death was concealed in a sea of paper for that one thousand years. The heritage of Rufinus was the first and longest-enduring paper Empire.
It is not accidental that in the tenure of Rufinus as Master of Offices, the duplication of written copies was first brought about. This was not on the order of carbon paper used at the instant of writing; it was wet-process copies made from a finished piece. The process is a detail, however; in the true sense Rufinus was the inventor of carbon copies. Shorthand was then five hundred years old, but Rufinus was the inventor of an improved form of shorthand.
It is believed that certain clerks of his appointing are still shuffling papers at the same desks. The paper world he set up was self-perpetuating.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome

“Foreman, you’re the historian,�� Thomas said. “It’s tha same damned thing they killed me for the first time, isn’t it?��
“Same damned thing, Thomas.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“What about Cathead?�� Thomas asked the precis machine.
“Cathead is the cancer that is being excised from this world. It is the cancer because the inhabitants of Cathead regard themselves as individuals and believe in the importance of themselves. Yes, Cathead is quite large, the largest of the cities, larger even than Cosmopolis the capital. We will leave Cathead out of account here since it is not typical of Astrobe.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“Aye, a man’d be a fool to lose his head twice over the same thing,�� Thomas mused, still looking more than half stubborn. “Of course I’ll sign.��
“He’d have to feel himself a little better than those around him to take up a challenge like that,�� Foreman put in hurriedly as Thomas had already touched magnetic stylus to the form.
“He’d have to be a man of some pride.��
“I am a man of some pride,�� Thomas said. “I do feel myself a little better than those around me, now that I really look at them.��
“He’d have to be a man who couldn’t be pushed and couldn’t be scared,�� said Foreman.
“I say I’m such a man, even if it’s a lie. But I scare a little,�� Thomas said.
“He’d have to be a man who’d stand his ground even if he were scared,�� Foreman needled.
“He’d have to be quite a man to die for a point, even if he understood it only at the last minute, and then dimly. He’d have to be such a man-��
“Foreman, you fool, what are you up to?�� Proctor demanded.
“Who pushed me into the corner the other time, Fabian?�� Thomas asked softly. “Who required my head of me for his point?��
“If you’re granted another life, Thomas, you try to figure it out. Will he be writ as friend or enemy of you, do you think? On which side did he seem?”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“Dr. Ginochio Gyves would have been the first man on the moon except for a trifling error of navigation. He lands. He sees a wild landscape, small pseudo-horses, and little brown people. But they are little Mexican people and little Mexican donkeys or burros, and he is in Mexico rather than on the moon. I always get those two places confused myself.”
― R.A. Lafferty

“They were the highly civilized people of Cosmopolis itself. It was a fools�� carnival indeed, all split into high-spirited warring factions spilling over into masquerade. Heads were broken, and people laughed, as if it had been a thousand years before. The “Ban and Beyond�� people had their banners flying, and flying wedges of opponents, with and without mottos, pulled them down in a glorious melee. The “Sackcloth and Ashes�� faction was marching and joking. The newly-appointed (or self-appointed) Metropolitan of Astrobe had put that whole world under interdict, until penance be done and until certain conditions should be fulfilled; and groups were making up and singing ballads about it. High Ladies of Astrobe dressed up like old crones and hawked candy heads and skulls in honor of the beheading tomorrow. Wooly Rams were found somewhere, and spitted and barbecued over the bonfires, about fifty people devouring each Wooly Ram as they tore it apart in pieces, half seared and half raw. The feast of the Wooly Ram had not been held on Astrobe for more than three hundred years, and only antiquarians could have known about it.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“All of the real original stories, all of the best stories, were first told by the animals. The bears were superb story-tellers; so were the deep-space geese (they took nine generations to make a migration, laying eggs on the space journey and hatching out of them on the space journey, for the summer-land of their migrations was not on Earth). The brindled cave-cats were very good story-tellers. Among the stories were well-established genre stories. The seals told under-water stories that they learned from river-and-ocean creatures; and the golden weasels, who really came from the moon, told all sorts of space stories. So the Neanderthals, who learned the stories from the animals, had a very good stock of tales.”
― R.A. Lafferty, It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs

“Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, once broke off the account of his hero Raphaelus in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet of six yards' span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these words: “Here it becomes necessary to pause for a moment and to recount to you the history of the world up to this point.��
After Fabulinus had given the history of the world up to that point, he took up the action of Raphaelus once more. It happened that the giant goose egg contained a nubile young girl. This revelation would have been startling to a reader who had not just read the history of the world up to that point; which history—being Fabulinian in its treatment—prepared him for the event.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome

“Perfection is nearly always impossible, but it is never difficult. Which is to say that if there is any difficulty to it, any lack of ease, then it has already failed of perfection. All perfect things are easy. But they are not frequent��

�� The mark of perfection is its very simplicity. Charles had a knack for untying knots, for resolving difficulties. The knack does not consist of ignoring the difficulties nor in skirting them. It doesn’t even consist of facing them and conquering them in the old copy-book fashion, though apparently they are faced and conquered in another fashion. Or some of them are never conquered at all. Part of the idea is just not to be difficult about difficulties.

If the rest of the idea were understood, then everyone would have perfection; and they do not.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Dotty

“What had dried up was not a well or pool or ocean of physical water. What had dried up was wit, and artistry, and congruence, and enjoyment, and the sparkle of the spirit. What had dried up was creativity in every form... Musicians couldn't improvise. They had nothing left to improvise with. The art of creative lying came to an end. Profanity became tired: it became louder and more in use, but it was repetitious and unoriginal. Pornography similarly lost gusto and increased in stridency. Jokes died out, and intuitions died. Problem-solving was a lost talent. And the roily oil that had made the slide through life so much easier had now lost its slickness and turned into an abrasive. The incredible creativity by which (and only by which) persons had managed to get along with each other at all was gone... At least one-third of the persons in the world had been super-creative in personal relations. If it hadn't been so, then personal relations would have been impossible.”
― R.A. Lafferty

“Persons such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan say that tens of thousands (maybe tens of millions) of planets will fulfill the conditions for the support of life. And then they take the rather deceptive step from the ‘possibility of life�� to the ‘inevitability of life�� by such connivance as would shame a crooked gambler. They posit towering numbers of ‘civilizations�� on those ‘possibility-of-life planets��, at least half of them to be more advanced than the Civilization of Earth and Humankind.
But there is a strong element of Advocacy Science in this. There is a great and powerful lobby advocating the existence of great numbers of superior civilizations. One reason for this is that the secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction of scientists cannot allow the uniqueness of anything, not of Earth, not of Life, certainly not of Human Life, most certainly not of existing Human Civilization. To allow the uniqueness of any of these things, they would have to cease to be secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic persons. And the shock of changing their style would kill all of them.
Science Fiction also has a vested interest in there being a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and civilizations. That is one of the small number of things that Science Fiction is about. But Science Fiction is, after all, only a fiction.”
― R.A. Lafferty, It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs

“Stilicho first talked of himself; and then of the Empire, which was an extension of himself. He gave it as his studied and honest opinion that he was the best horseman in the world, the best archer and targeteer, the best lancer, and that he had been the best swordsman; one cannot remain the best with the sword without spending six to eight hours a day in the practice of it. Stilicho attested that he was the greatest foot soldier alive, being able to cover afoot seventy Roman miles over rough country between midnight and midnight under the full weight of arms and provisions—about a hundred pounds in modern weight. Stilicho could endure hunger and thirst and privation beyond all others; he could plan and project more than could another man; he could hold every detail of a countryside in his head, and could recall the underfoot stones of a night path a dozen years later. He could see the pattern of affairs and the pattern behind the pattern.
Stilicho spoke of himself without vainglory, and certainly without modesty. He acknowledged that it was unusual for one man so to excel in everything; but was happy that that one person should be such a responsible person as himself. He gave the opinion that even in himself it would be a short-term affair. Soon his hand and his mind would weaken a little, and soon another man—probably one of them—would move into his place. A dozen years, he told them, is an extreme limit of the time in which a man may serve faultlessly”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome

“Here we come to a semantic difficulty. Other peoples who were of considerable civilization had been referred to as barbarians for more than a thousand years. Others had been called by the names of the wolves. When the wolves themselves came, there was no other name to give them. The Goths, who were kingdom-founding Christians, had been called barbarians. The Gauls of ancient lineage had been so called, and the talented Vandals.
Even the Huns had been called barbarians. This is a thing beyond all comprehension, and yet it is not safe to contradict the idea even today. The Huns were a race of over-civilized kings traveling with their Courts. In the ordering of military affairs and in overall organization they had no superiors in the world. They were skilled diplomats, filled with urbanity and understanding. All who came into contact with them, Persians, Armenians, Greeks, Romans, were impressed by the Huns' fairness in dealing—considering that they were armed invaders; by their restraint and adaptability; by their judgment of affairs; by their easy luxury. They brought a new elegance to the Empire peoples; and they had assimilated a half dozen cultures, including that of China. But the Huns were not barbarians; no more were any of the other violent visitors to the Empire heretofore.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome

“Science Fiction is a collection of guerrilla bands each challenging the rights of the others to belong to the centrality. The band most challenged by the others is ‘high fantasy��, sometimes called ‘Sword and Sorcery��. There is a lot of stylized sneering at ‘S and S��.”
― R.A. Lafferty, It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs

“Q: Didn't you mention somewhere that you were writing poetry before you were writing stories?

RAL: I was, but I didn't consider that commercial. Of course I have used a lot of those since then as chapter heads, and little verses I have scattered in. In fact I have used up all the good
ones.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Cranky old man from Tulsa: Interviews with R.A. Lafferty

“Pottscamp felt nothing; he was, of course, a machine without feeling. He had no conscience or compassion. This would not bother him at all.
It wouldn’t?
Then why did he-?
Then why did he-WHAT?
Sat on the ground and moaned and howled like an old Hebrew. And poured dust and ashes over his head.
You’re crazy. He really did that?
He really did that.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“The seven bad-humored and unfunny devils who eat ourselves and our narratives alive are Pretentiousness, Pomposity, Presumption, Pontificality, Pavoninity or Peacockery, Pornography, and Pride, these seven offenses to all life. They have oozed out from under the iron doors and then they have inflated themselves immeasurably.”
― R.A. Lafferty, It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs

“It is said that—Arcadius having offered its weight in gold for the head of Gainas—King Uldin drew out the brains of Gainas and poured in molten lead to win a better bargain with his prize. This part of the story has been doubted, and for no better reason than that it had been told five hundred years earlier of the head of Gaius Gracchus—as though a good trick might not be pulled more than once.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome

“I say no man ever before slew his friend mouthful of words.��
“And I say it has happened many times before. Consider the Assassinations, Thomas, you who are something of a critic of historical theses. Consider whether the Heroes have not more often been assassinated by friends than by enemies; consider whether some of them have not even been assassinated with their own consent.��
“I don’t consent.��
“If everything else has failed, if a program has fallen for such a silly nothing, if the hero would make a better hero when dead, then he was made a dead hero by his friends, for his own sake and the sake of his program. I could name a dozen clear cases of this, but I won’t; strong partisan feelings are still involved in some of them after the centuries. -”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“Not for thirty reigns have there been so many grand people in the court at Goslar at one time,�� said he. “Strike a medal for it, man.��
“I don’t know how to strike a medal for it,�� the man said.
“If you find someone who does, tell him to strike a medal for it,�� the Emperor said. “Put my own fine hand on it, and the motto They Come To Me Like Eagles. Why, here is a dead saint from Old Earth, the Devil-kid of Astrobe, a necromancer of unlikely powers, a transcendent ansel, a priest of Saint Klingensmith, an avatar who burns up bodies, and pilot Paul who is a broken-faced old warlock. Not for thirty reigns have there been so many grand people at court at one time, and not for thirty reigns has there been so handsome an Emperor at the head of the court.��
“How long a time has the thirty reigns been?�� Thomas asked him.
“It has been what we call a rapid year,�� the Emperor said, “perhaps the most rapid ever.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“When we build excellences into human persons, Victor, we do not build up or upon. We build down, which is another way of saying that we refine. We cut down. We carve out. We sculpt.��
‘From what stones do we sculpt, Swing? Is it from the ‘Magnificent Blanks�� that you sometimes speak of?��
‘Yes, and there are such things, though you all smile at such statements from me as though I were concealing something behind a fanciful notion. There were even some Magnificent Blanks on this world once. The Cro-Magnons were such, and most of the people still carry some of their blood. The essence of the ‘Magnificents�� is that they should be large-brained and long-lived and vigorous; and that they should have a certain style, which is the same thing as grace, or as power-in-balance. And the essence of the ‘Blanks�� is a sort of hairy invisibility, a condition in which nobody will look at them twice, in which nobody will pluck or plunder them before their time.”
― R.A. Lafferty

“The problem of having a life-possible temperature over a fair part of area for a fair part of the time has been solved by Earth by a deep inclination (25° 27' to the perpendicular of the plane of orbit) to give the seasons, by a rapid rotation to give reasonable days and nights, and by an orbit that is only slightly eccentric to act as governor. This latter is very tricky: ask any demiurge who is in the business of making and positioning planets.”
― R.A. Lafferty, It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs

“And at almost the identical time two men were murdered. One of them was a Great Liberal Statesman who was actually a shoddy phony, and one was a Well-Beloved Conservative Leader whose own family couldn't stand him. There was a further distortion. The reports of both murders were out slightly before they happened, and partisans of both men had begun to gather.
And just previous to the riots, an army detachment had crossed over from Virginia to put down the riots. The military could not find the reported corpses strewing the sidewalks. Wisely they waited. They were only a little bit early.
In other sections, students attacked soldiers. The students always averaged about ten years older than the soldiers.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

“You believe, in one of your theories, that we're in control of the world. We aren't. But we have been, and we will be whenever we wish. It's a day you will fear to see, that we come fully awake again. And we do come awake now. We will regain the world. Certain later interlopers have for some time ruled heaven and earth. Now we come back -- ruthlessly."
"Don't you believe the others also have rights?"
"The others have had the run of their rights long enough. They are the interlopers, and it's time that the ancient line is restored. --Oh, Foley, I misunderstood you completely; that's always the difficulty of conversing with infants. You mean PEOPLE. You mean do people have any rights? Oh no, I don't believe that people have any rights.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

“Overlark is a brilliant man in the Humanist Tradition."
"At the name of which even buzzards gag.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

“I know the look of a hunted man, even a defiant one. Surely there are not King’s Men on Astrobe who hunt down and kill.��
“No, they are different, Thomas. They are Programmed Mechanical Killers.��
“No, they are the same, Paul. King’s Men everywhere are programmed mechanical killers. But
I see that I will have to discover for myself the name of the real king of Astrobe.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Past Master

“It is a southern river town with some pretensions of being a city... And like every southern river town it has its canker....
The capital has its own orneriness, as pervading as the others, but it isn't the same sort. It never was a fun town. It is not a robust sin town. Its fleshpots have no real juice in them. Its vices are effete and heterodox, and its moral rot is a dry one. Though its people have come from all parts, yet they are not all sorts of people. They are very much of one sort. The ethic climate here nurtures an ancient, evil, shriveled thing. It is of the inhabitants of this city that the prophet spoke:
Of those who do not have the faith
And will not have the fun.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

“The Goths had trained bears and possibly, from one garbled account, trained seals.
The dance is something with no survival, lacking verbal or pictorial record. The Goths may have had it. If they painted, it was not in a medium or on a material that has survived. Their history was unwritten. Their scientific speculation may not have gone beyond mead-table discussions and arguments. There is no record of their early philosophy. Since they were Germans, they must have constructed philosophical systems; and also, since they were Germans, these would have been erroneous.”
― R.A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome

“The lad knew a trick for see­ing things in their right size in­stead of in the il­lu­sion that they pro­ject... The lad tried that same trick now. He turned around, bent over, and looked at the Per­son back­wards between his legs. And by that view­ing, the Per­son Him­self was a ver­it­able gi­ant, taller than the trees, taller than the dis­tance between here and a full moon. Then the lad straightened up and turned around and looked at the Per­son front­wards; and the il­lu­sion re­turned... and the Per­son was again only a rather large and al­to­gether pleas­ant man, not too large to be ac­coun­ted in the nor­mal hu­man range.”
― R.A. Lafferty

“Hold! Go no further!�� upset people cry out. “You are coming too near to the subject named ‘religion��!��
Yes, ‘Religion�� is one of the taboo words that modern science fictioneers may not think nor say, unless they use it to mean something else. The selective speculation which they are allowed will not stretch far enough to allow religion itself, not far enough to see that we have passed the Isthmus and have only to take off our handcuffs and blindfolds to be free. In this, the narrowness, Science Fiction stands where much science stood a hundred years ago and where almost all pseudo-science still stands today.”
― R.A. Lafferty, It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs