Murray Leinster (1896 – 1975)
Nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history.
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The secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels.
It was totally unrealistic to think that because there had been wildly unlikely coincidences in the immediate past, that there would be more wildly unlikely ones turning up in orderly succession. Yet...
Most men develop convictions about the cosmos and such beliefs come in two varieties. One kind is a conviction that the cosmos does not make sense. That it exists by chance and changes by chance and human beings do not matter. This view produces a fine complacency. The other kind is a belief that the cosmos does make sense, and was designed with the idea that people were going to live in it, and that what they do and what happens to them is important. This theory seems to be depressing.
His reasoning was emotional, and therefore simple.
Desolate and dreary as the little town was in the world of today, it was infinitely more liveable than the same town of nearly two centuries before. There had been much progress in how to do things. It was regrettable that there was less progress in knowledge of things worth doing.
There is never a rational reason for a man to rejoice that a certain pretty girl exists and that he has found her. The experience, however, is universal.
It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable.
It isn’t illegal to buy an artist’s work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!
I've never noticed that being nonsensical keeps things from happening. Don’t you ever read about politics?
“We’re fools!” said Harrison. “Morons! Idiots!”
“If you speak of my altruism,” said Pepe cheerfully, “I agree. But if you speak of your interest in a very pretty girl, then I point out that nobody is ever as happy as while he is making a fool of himself over a woman.
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