Choice - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them has to be right.

- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961)

When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

The only thing she was conscious of lacking was a direction, and what was that but a matter of pointing a finger?

- Thomas M. Disch, 334 (1974)

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Day Before the Revolution'' (1974)

A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment.

- Philip K. Dick, author's note to A Scanner Darkly (1977)

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you.

- Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (1985)

I've always tried to walk the path of honor. But what do you do when all choices are evil? Shameful action, shameful inaction, every path leading to a thicket of death.

- Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (1986)

The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice.

- Richard Bach, One (1988)

We can have excuses, or we can have health, love, longevity, understanding, adventure, money, happiness.We design our lives through the power of our choices.We feel most helpless when we've made choices by default, when we haven't designed our lives on our own.

- Richard Bach, One (1988)

Don't bother with the sardines when Leviathan looms.

- Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows,WhiteWhale (1992)

The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible inbetween. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment. To choose something better, to make a difference, as you say. And I intend to do just that.

- J. Michael Straczynski, ''The Coming of Shadows,'' episode of Babylon 5 (1995)

The trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things which are worst for them.

- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997)

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999)