Harry Harrison Quotes & Sayings

So mankind gobbled in a century all the world's resources that had taken millions of years to store up, and no one on the top gave a damn or listened to all the voices that were trying to warn them, they just let us overproduce and overconsume until now the oil is gone, the topsoil depleted and washed away, the trees chopped down, the animals extinct, the earth poisoned, and all we have to show for this is seven billion people fighting over the scraps that are left, living a miserable existence - and still breeding without control. So I say the time has come to stand up and be counted. — Harry Harrison

I always get the best advice from myself. — Harry Harrison

If you want the little luxuries of life you have to be prepared to pay for them. — Harry Harrison

Intelligence resembles insanity only on the stupid. — Harry Harrison

Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad. — Harry Harrison

Every day should be unwrapped as a gift. — Harry Harrison

Liberation by destruction was on the way! We would free them even if we had to kill them all to do it! — Harry Harrison

I like Ireland because it means I'm near France. — Harry Harrison

But doing something means that people must change, make an effort, use their minds, which is what most people do not like to do. — Harry Harrison

We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment... — Harry Harrison

Because of the power shortage and lack of replacement parts there was only one elevator running in the Empire State Building, and this one went only as high as the twenty-fifth floor. After that you walked. — Harry Harrison

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead. — Harry Harrison

The principles we live by, in business and in social life, are the most important part of happiness. — Harry Harrison

Darling, the history of medicine is the history of the violation of natural law. The Church - and that includes the Protestant as well as the Catholic - tried to stop the use of anesthetics because it was natural law for a woman to have pain while giving birth. And it was natural law for people to die of sickness. And natural law that the body not be cut open and repaired. — Harry Harrison

You can't stop the world and get off, so you just have to learn to live on it. — Harry Harrison

One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and burned it and it's gone now. — Harry Harrison

We got a plague of people, a disease of people infesting the world. We got more people who are living longer. Less people have to be born, that's the answer. We got death control - we got to match it with birth control. — Harry Harrison

Birth control doesn't mean no children. It just means that people have a choice how they want to live. Like rutting, unthinking, breeding animals - or like reasoning creatures. Will a married couple have one, two or three children - whatever number will keep the world population steady and provide a full life of opportunity for everyone? Or will they have four, five or six, unthinking and uncaring, and raise them in hunger and cold and misery? Like that world out there, — Harry Harrison

He didn't say so but Andy agreed with the bodyguard. A good-looking bird like this one didn't have to kill anyone. What she did she did for D's and if a guy gave her too much trouble she'd just walk out and find someone else with money. Not murder. — Harry Harrison