Imagination and ideas - 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!

What never has been cannot be imagined.

- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920)

We must cut out imagination. In everyone . . . Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do . . .

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

They brought with them weapons of considerable might, not knowing that we have a weapon truly invincible. [. . .] It took us thousands of years to learn about the sheer invincibility of an idea. That's what we've got - a way of life, an idea. Nothing can blast that to shreds. Nothing can defeat an idea - except a better one.

- Eric Frank Russell, ''Late Night Final'' (1948)

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

- William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)

You don't put ideas in boys' heads; they grow them naturally.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Time for the Stars (1956)

If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real things.

- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961)

Human beings are always thinking up things they can't have, or think exist somewhere else. It's a habit they have, although I must say I don't quite understand it. Seems like a waste of time.

- Gregory Benford, ''Stand-In'' (1965)

Facts are the children of imagination. It's only through the eye of the imagination that you see the true picture of this strange universe. If imagination is strong and pure, unsullied by doubt, its truth is the only truth. Facts are simply what they're imagined to be.

- William F. Temple, ''The Legend of Ernie Deacon'' (1965)

When every new idea is born an old one dies. But dies hard.

- Burt K. Filer, ''Eye of the Beholder'' (1972)

Sometimes there is nothing better to do for an idea than to die for it.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''TheWorld Is a Sphere'' (1973)

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

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

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

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

Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you've got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.

- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye (1974)

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

- Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)

The dimension of the imagination is much more complex than those of time and space, which are very junior dimensions indeed.

- Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic (1983)

The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.

- Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)

A person trusts her life to what she believes. Her ideas have to support her, they have to take the weight of her own questions and the weight of a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand critics and cynics and destroyers. Her ideas have to stand the stress of every consequence they bring!

- Richard Bach, One (1988)

The exciting thing about ideas is putting them to work. The moment we try them on our own, launch them away from shore, they switch from what-if to become daring plunges down white rivers, as dangerous and as exhilarating.

- Richard Bach, One (1988)

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Creatures on My Mind'' (1990)

So many good ideas have to be discarded simply because they won't work.

- David Eddings, The Sapphire Rose (1991)

No fancy in the world is all untrue.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

Captive imaginations do breed quite effectively, because they are protected from the terrible predator known as Thought.

- Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, and Ian Stewart, The Science of Discworld (1999)