Arkady Strugatsky Quotes & Sayings

but strangely enough, his eyebrows and eyebrows were intact. — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

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 — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

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 — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

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

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

I am positive that in the vast majority of cases we are hammering nails with microscopes. — Arkady Strugatsky

Emotion, as we all know, is lack of information and nothing more. — Arkady Strugatsky

It's funny, I wonder why we like being praised. There's no money in it. Fame? How famous could we get? ... Aren't humans absurd? I suppose we like praise for its own sake. The way children like ice cream. It's an inferiority complex, that's what it is. Praise assuages our insecurities. And ridiculously so. — Arkady Strugatsky

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

And so they sat in silence. Sipping cold tea. Smoking. The windows of the house across the street shone molten gold, the silver sickle of the new moon hung in the dark blue sky, and there was a sharp crackling sound coming through the window - they must have been burning old crates again on the street. — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

It's like trying to fit an octopus into a pair of tuxedo pants. And not a plain octopus at that, but an octopus that doesn't even exist. — Arkady Strugatsky

Have we never had to compromise before? Of course, hundreds of times! And will hundreds more! And not with gods, but with lousy bureaucrats, with nits who are disgusting to touch. — Arkady Strugatsky

Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption - that an alien race would be psychologically human. — Arkady Strugatsky

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

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

Mankind's most impressive achievement is that it has survived and intends to continue doing so. — Arkady Strugatsky

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

It's a common observation that all science fiction novels say as much about the time of their composition as they do about the future. As they wrote Hard to Be a God, the Strugatsky brothers were working under considerable political pressure. Following Khrushchev's infamous visit to an exhibition of abstract art in 1962 ("dog shit" was one of his more printable responses) a wave of panicked ideological house-cleaning swept through the Soviet Union's artistic establishment. For SF writers, as Boris Strugatsky remembers, this resulted in a reminder that the only truly orthodox subject was "the collision of two worlds. — Arkady Strugatsky

I lock myself in the stall, take out the flask, unscrew it, and attach myself to it like a leech. I'm sitting on the bench, my heart is empty, my head is empty, my soul is empty, gulping down the hard stuff like water. Alive. I got out. The Zone let me out. The damned hag. My lifeblood. Traitorous bitch. Alive. The novices can't understand this. No one but a stalker can understand. And tears are pouring down my face - maybe from the booze, maybe from something else. I suck the flask dry; I'm wet, the flask is dry. As usual, I need just one more sip. Oh well, we'll fix that. We can fix anything now. Alive. I light a cigarette and stay seated. I can feel it - I'm coming around. — Arkady Strugatsky

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? — Arkady Strugatsky

You can imagine anything at all. And real life is never what you imagine. — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

To tell you the truth the only thing I feel, Peter, is that you're going about this all wrong. You're following the most natural roads, and for that reason you've ended up in particularly unnatural places. You're exploring alibis, gathering clues, looking for motives. But it seems to me that, in this particular case the usual terms of your art have lost their meaning, the same way that the concept of time changes meaning at speeds faster than light ... — Arkady Strugatsky

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

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 — Arkady Strugatsky

I was told that this road would take me to the ocean of death, and turned back halfway. Since then crooked, round-about, godforsaken paths stretch out before me. — Arkady Strugatsky

Monday Starts on Saturday. — Arkady Strugatsky

HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED! — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

He gives me a look, and I see that he's in no mood for jokes. He's right - this is no joke. But when you're leaving for the Zone, it's one of two things: you start bawling, or you crack jokes - and I'm sure as hell not crying. I take a look at Kirill. He's holding up OK, only mouthing something silently, as if praying. "Praying?" I ask. "Pray, pray! The farther into the Zone, the closer to heaven." "What?" he says. "Pray!" I yell. "Stalkers cut in line at the gates of heaven! — Arkady Strugatsky

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. — Arkady Strugatsky

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

You should have long since gotten rid of military-industrial complexes. — Arkady Strugatsky

We don't notice things change. We know that things change, we've been told since childhood that things change, we've witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we're still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes
or we search for change in all the wrong places. — Arkady Strugatsky

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

Or how about this hypothetical definition. Reason is a complex type of instinct that has not yet formed completely. This implies that instinctual behavior is always purposeful and natural. A million years from now our instinct will have matured and we will stop making the mistakes that are probably integral to reason. An then, if something should change in the universe, we will all become extinct - precisely because we will have forgotten how to make mistakes, that is, to try various approaches not stipulated by an inflexible program of permitted alternatives. — Arkady Strugatsky