The Kraken Wakes

Find a nice, self sufficient hilltop, and fortify it.

Darling, whose book is this to be?" "Ostensibly yours, my sweet" "I see -- rather like my life since I met you?" "Yes darling

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

I suppose a book is still a book, even if no one but the author and his wife reads it," she said.

My protective coloration isn't intended to deceive you, my sweet. It is intended to deceive me.

There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled...

Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool’s vote is equal to a sensible man’s? If all the energy that is put into diddling mugs for their votes could be turned on to useful work, what a nation we could be!

As a race, we have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the idea that the proper way to die is in bed, at a ripe age. It is a delusion. The normal end for all creatures comes suddenly.

Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason?

Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can’t even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race. No,’ he shook his head, ‘no, I’m afraid Bocker’s idea of fraternization never had the chance of a flea in a furnace.

What do a few thousands, or a few millions of people matter? Women will just go on making the loss good. But Governments are important–one mustn’t risk them.

Failure. That is a word so little to our taste that many think it a virtue to claim that they never admit it. But blind stupidity is not one of the virtues; it is a weakness...

The Sunday Tidings, which had for some years been pursing a policy of intellectual sensationalism, had never found it easy to maintain its supply of material. The stuff of mere emotional sensationalism, as used by its cheaper and less dignified contemporaries, lay thickly all around, easily malleable into shapes attractive to the constant human passions. Intellectual sensationalism, however, was a much more tricky business. In addition to avoiding the suggestion of sensationalism for sensationalism's sake, it required knowledge, research, careful timing, and, if possible, some literary ability. Inevitably, therefore, its policy was subject to lamentable gaps during which it could find nothing topical on its chosen level to disclose.

Among the other papers I bought at London Airport was the current number of The Beholder. Thought it is, I am aware, not without its merits and even well thought of in some circles, it leaves me with an abiding sense that it is more given to expressing its first prejudices than its second thoughts. Perhaps if it were to go to press a day later....

I don't care. I don't mind working hard when there's hope. It was having no more hope that was too much for me.

What is more, nobody has ever actually proved him wrong. His chief trouble was that he usually provided such large, indigestible slabs that they stuck in all gullets—even mine, and I would class myself as a fairly wide-gulleted type.

once we had developed intelligence we weren’t satisfied with the world as we found it;

It won’t be just one bomb. And it was always too late, my dear. Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can’t even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race.

But the Russians tried to explode the idea. They said at the time it was just a smokescreen to cover the preparations of war-mongers,” I pointed out. “That,” said Tuny, “wasn’t even subtle. It’s their regular technique to get in the first accusation against someone else of what they are doing themselves.

Very well, then if it could not have evolved on earth, it must have evolved somewhere else—say, on a large planet where the pressures were normally very high. If so, how did it cross space and arrive here?