Arkady Strugatsky Quotes

You need money so you don't have to think about money.

Dye a specsuit any color other than the original red, and any stalker would put down five hundred for it without batting an eyelash"
"It's light, comfortable, not too tight, and you don't sweat in it from the heat. You can go right through a fire in this thing, and no gas will penetrate it. It's even bulletproof, they say. Of course, fire toxic gas, and bullets -these are only Earth perils. The Zone doesn't have those; in the Zone you have other worries.

He made the sign of the cross, clumsily, with a Catholic accent

In some sense, we're all cavemen - we can't imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality - that's actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts ... or Rubinstein's monsters ... or is that Wallenstein?"
"Frankenstein.

Until he had come up with a name, he was too pathetic to look at
a real idiot. But now that he had some label like graviconcentrate, he thought that he understood everything and life was a breeze.

How can I give up stalking when I have a family to feed? Get a job? I don't want to work for you, your work makes me puke, do you understand? This is the way I figure it: if a man works with you, he is always working for one of you, he is a slave and nothing else. And I always wanted to be myself, on my own, so that I could spit at you all, at your boredom and despair.

Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world

Our century people shoot themselves because they're ashamed before others - society, friends ... In the last century people shot themselves because they were ashamed before themselves. You

That's the Zone for you: come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success; come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else - that's fate.

You're absolutely right. Our little town is a hole. It always has been and still is. But now it is a hole into the future. We're going to dump so much through this hole into your lousy world that everything will change in it. Life will be different. It'll be fair. Everyone will have everything that he needs. Some hole, huh? Knowledge comes through this hole. And when we have the knowledge, we'll make everyone rich, and we'll fly to the stars, and go anywhere we want. That's the kind of hole we have here

That the moon was bright, tiny and icy-looking; and that around me for many miles there was nothing but snow and rocks. I had a talk with the St. Bernard, who was making his nightly rounds; he agreed that the night was too quiet and empty, and that solitude, despite its numerous benefits, was really a lousy thing. Still, he refused outright to break the valley's silence and join me in a howl, or even just a good bark. In response to my request he just shook his head, walked away with a dissatisfied look and lay down by the porch.

but strangely enough, his eyebrows and eyebrows were intact.

But why in the world do we need money, if all we ever do is keep working?

Twenty times better to err on the person than suspicious of everyone.

For some reason he suddenly remembered that Hamfist Kitty's real name was Raphael. The nickname Hamfist came from his monstrous bony fists, bluish red and bare, that protruded from the thick fur covering his arms as if from a pair of sleeves. And he named himself Kitty in complete confidence that this was the traditional name of the great Mongolian kings. Raphael.

And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can't do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can't stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere - an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers - and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people - from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society:

Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo. Bureaucrats and politicians, who can't afford to cultivate their imaginations, tend to assume it's all ray-guns and nonsense, good for children. A writer may have to be as blatantly critical of utopia as Zamyatin in We to bring the censor down upon him. The Strugatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government's policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology - something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write.

He went into the Gray Joy, drank a glass of Arkanarian brew, patted the hostess's cheek, and deftly used one of his swords to flip the table of the usual informer, who was gawking at him with empty eyes. Then he walked over to a far corner and tracked down a shabby bearded man with an inkwell around his neck. "Hello, Brother Nanin," he said. "How many petitions have you written today?"
Brother Nanin smiled shyly, showing small, decayed teeth. "There aren't many petitions written nowadays, noble don," he said. "Some people think that asking is pointless, while others expect that in the near future they'll be able to take without asking.

Intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.

The Experiment is the Experiment." For all its contemptuous insanity, the idea still seemed to have some kind of rational kernel to it.

The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth. In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words. Years

There's a need to understand, but that doesn't require knowledge. The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing ... Give a man a highly simplified model of the world and interpret every event on the basis of this simple model. This approach requires no knowledge. A few rote formulas, plus some so-called intuition, some so-called practical acumen, and some so-called common sense.

The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparallelled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing.

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around ... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind ... And of course, the usual mess - apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody's handkerchief, somebody's penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

Take myths, for instance! As we know, fools are the overwhelming majority, which means that the witness to any interesting event has generally been a fool. Ergo: a myth is a description of a real event as perceived by a fool and refined by a poet. eh?

Do we really need ourselves for anything?

If I could imagine myself as God, I'd become him!

Strange department, this. Their motto was: "The comprehension of Infinity requires infinite time." I did not argue with that, but then they derived an unexpected conclusion from it: Therefore work or not, it´s all the same."
In the interests of not increasing the entropy of the universe, they did not work.

I'm living in a world someone has thought up without bothering to tell me, or maybe even himself.

The hypothesis of God, for instance, gives an incomparably absolute opportunity to understand everything and know absolutely nothing. Give man an extremely simplified system of the world and explain every phenomenon away on the basis of that system. An approach like that doesn't require any knowledge. Just a few memorized formulas plus so-called intuition and so-called common sense.

Monday Starts on Saturday.