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In fact man's career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids.

Olaf Stapledon

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Olaf Stapledon
Age: 64 †
Born: 1886
Born: May 10
Died: 1950
Died: September 6
Paramedic
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Facts
Mountain
Great
Rock
Hurtling
Men
Rocks
Torrent
Like
Career
Sluggish
Careers
Rapids
Broken
Seldom
Less
River
Fact
Rivers

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In a sick world even the hale are sick.
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Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?
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Philosophy is an amazing tissue of really fine thinking and incredible, puerile mistakes. It's like one of those rubber 'bones' they give dogs to chew, damned good for the mind's teeth, but as food - no bloody good at all.
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To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident... themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.
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In you, humanity is precarious and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.
Olaf Stapledon
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My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have *felt* it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.
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I loathe the urchin's cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler's mass-torturing, but not Hitler and the money-man's heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow's flight, and I love the swallow the urchin's gleam of tenderness, and the urchin.
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That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.
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The Tibetan missionaries in their mood of bright confidence disconcerted the imperial governments by laughing the new movement into frustration. For a sham faith cannot stand ridicule.
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So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.
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In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid.
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No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb [Earth] teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.
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It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit... We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.
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Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.
Olaf Stapledon
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We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.
Olaf Stapledon
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It seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.
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In that instant when I had seen... the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.
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A nation . . . is just a society for hating foreigners.
Olaf Stapledon