Alas Babylon Quotes

I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished . . . when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.

If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man.

'Legs are for men's pleasure, breasts are for babies'.' " - Lib McGovern

It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education.

He was tough as an antique ivory figurine, which has withstood the viscissitudes of centuries and can accept more.

It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust to make her own life worth living.

none of this talk. A week or so later, thinking about Mark’s words, Randy had decided to go into

Small nations, when treated as equals, become the firmest of allies.” It

Out of death, life; an immutable truth

'I think you ought to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or any city with character and vitality. You should go to work. This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles. You're vegetating. I don't want a vegetable. I want a man.' " - Lib McGovern

Our whole raison d’être was deterrent force. When you don’t deter them any longer, you lose.

noticed that it was a clear and beautiful spring day, a better day than yesterday. The spores of kindness, as well as faith, survived in this acid soil. Randy

There’s an old saying that anyone can make colonel on his own, but it takes a wife to make a general.

One calling for optimism, pragmatism, and a belief that all problems might be solved, with enough courage, determination, good

Some nations and some people melt in the heat of crisis and come apart like fat in the pan. Others meet the challenge and harden. I think you’re going to harden.

You know how it is. When you’ve never been some place, you want to go.” Randy

I don’t want money. What the hell’s money good for? You can’t drive it and you can’t eat it and it won’t even fix a flat.

The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County. Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years. So ended The Day.

He had a feel for it, the capacity to stir a headful of unrelated facts until they congealed into a pattern arrowing the future. Dutch

When you examined the facts judicially, and asked which would provide the greatest good for the greatest number, there could be only one answer.

The bell announced that there was food on the table and a women in the kitchen.

Now at this hour, when the cirrus clouds stretched like crimson ribbons high across the southwest sky, in such a hush that not even a playful eddy dared stir moss or palm fronds, the day died in calm and in beauty.

How can we cash out-of-town checks when don't know whether a town's still there?

Censorship and thought control can exist only in secrecy and darkness.

Throughout the following era, while we struggled with our institutions, with one another, and with our own moral flaws, one of the things that kept many of us going was a sense of privilege. Only the very fortunate get to struggle. Only the living may improve.

I love you. I worn’ about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished and afraid when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.” His

You react to crisis the right way. You remember what Toynbee says? His theory of challenge and response applies not only to nations, but to individuals. Some nations and some people melt in the heat of crisis and come apart like fat in the pan. Others meet the challenge and harden. I think you're going to harden.

If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man. He remembered words which for four months he had not heard, read, or uttered, the most beautiful words in the language - faith and hope.

But he is dying faster than he should. The better a man is at business, the worse in retirement.

The only bad parts of it were cooking for one and eating alone.

There is a new crisis in the Middle East. A report from Beirut, via Cairo, says that Syrian tanks of the most modern Russian design have crossed the Jordanian frontier. This is undoubtedly a threat to Israel. At the same time Damascus charges that Turkish troops are mobilizing….” Florence

This disaster was perfectly predictable, Randy realized. He had been a fool. Instead of buying fresh meat, he should have bought canned meats by the case. If there was one thing he certainly should have foreseen, it was the loss of electricity.

Since The Day, he had lived in the imperative present, not daring to plan beyond the next meal or the next day. This bit of paper tacked on peeling white paint abruptly enlarged his perspective, as if, stumbling through a black tunnel, he saw, or thought he saw, a chink of light. If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man.

When a man dies, and his children die with him, then he is dead entirely, leaving nothing to show.

Whatever it is out there, is better equipped than you are. It can see better and hear better and smell better. All you’re got on it is brains. Your only chance of getting it is

Nations are like people. When they grow old and rich and fat they get conservative. They exhaust their energy trying to keep things the way they are—and that’s against nature. Oh,

Randy knew he wasn't an alcoholic because an alcoholic craved liquor. He never craved it. He just drank for pleasure and the most pleasurable of all drinks was the first one on a crisp winter morning. Besides, when you took it with coffee that made it part of breakfast, and therefore not so depraved.

With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan. And yet Randy stopped...The incident was important only because it was self-revelatory. Randy knew he would have to play by the old rules. He could not shuck his code, or sneak out of his era.

[He was disgusted] at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster.

The announcements went on, the voice calling out portions of states, and cities—Seattle, Hanford, San Francisco, all the southern California coast, Helena, Cheyenne—but Randy only half-heard them. All he could hear, distinctly, were the sharp sobs out of Peyton’s throat.

Randy walked to the bar-counter and began to sharpen his razor. The razor was a six-inch hunting knife. He honed its edges vigorously on a whetstone and then stropped it on a belt nailed to the wall. A clean, smooth, painless shave was one of the things he missed, but not what he missed most.

There are as many good things about civilization as bad. Perhaps more. And we would miss them. From toothbrushes to electric lights. From clean water to democracy. From bookstores to the kind of gentle, tolerant argumentation that never resorts to violence and allows for the slow changing of opinions,…and the gradual and diverse evolving of everybody’s minds. The core of what we now know that it means

Randy felt relieved. He looked out over the river, contemplating his ignorance of women and the peace of evening.

glad you are. Most American males have a fixation about the mammary gland. A symptom of monism, I think. Legs are for men’s pleasure, breasts for babies’.

In this second Randy made an important decision. Yesterday, he would have stopped instantly. There would have been no question about it. When there was an accident, and someone was hurt, a man stopped. But yesterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules as archaic as ancient Rome's. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun and Goth. Today a man saved himself and his family and to hell with everyone else. Already millions must be dead and other millions maimed, or doomed by radiation . . . And the war was less than a half hour old. So one stranger on the roadside meant nothing, particularly with a blinded child, his blood kin, depending on his mission. With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan.

A man who has been shaken by a two-ton blockbuster has a frame of reference. He can equate the impact of an H-bomb with his own experience, even though the H-bomb blast is a million times more powerful than the shock he endured. To someone who has never felt a bomb, bomb is only a word. An H-bomb's fireball is something you see on television. It is not something that incinerates you to a cinder in the thousandth part of a second. So the H-bomb is beyond the imagination of all but a few Americans, while the British, Germans, and Japanese can comprehend it, if vaguely. And only the Japanese have personal understanding of atomic heat and radiation.

Our wise acts accompany us through life to please us and to help us. Just as surely, our unwise acts follow us to plague and torment us. Alas, they cannot be forgotten. In the front rank of the torments that do follow us are the memories of the things we should have done, of the opportunities which came to us and we took not.

He still had a few cans of dog food for Graf, but he could foresee a time when humans might look upon dog food as a delicacy.

He knew he should not have spared time for tears, and would not, ever again.

The official Arab radio, in a broadcast from Damascus, claims that American carrier planes are conducting a violent bombing attack on the harbor of Latakia.

All these war scares are concocted by the Pentagon—no offense meant to your brother—to get more appropriations, and give more handouts to Europe, and jack up taxes. It’s all part of the damnable inflationary pattern that’s designed to cheat people on pensions and with fixed incomes and so forth. Now I know your brother thinks he’s doing the right thing, and I appreciate your telling Elizabeth.

You know how it is—everything that comes in is stamped secret or top secret or cosmic or something and the only people who dare declassify anything are the big wheels right at the top, and the people at the top hold conferences and somebody says, ‘Now, let’s not be hasty. Let’s not alarm the public.’ So everything stays secret or cosmic. Personally, I think everybody ought to be digging or evacuating right this minute. Maybe if the other side knew we were digging, if they knew that we knew, they wouldn’t try to get away with

I guess we’ll both have to learn to walk again.

LeMay says the only way a general can win a modern war is not fight one. Our whole raison d’être was deterrent force. When you don’t deter them any longer, you lose. I think we lost some time ago, because the last five Sputniks have been reconnaissance satellites.

...Alas, Babylon was to be among the first to give a public voice to the fears and anxieties associated with a nuclear attack and with threats of atomic radiation. And unlike others in the genre, he offered unmitigated hope. Randy Bragg and company not only survive the devastation that leaves vast Contaminated Zones throughout the United States, but they also apply the best in themselves to begin the re-establishment of life within a civil society. All of the atomic fears of the 1950s (and later) are there, but Frank's 'message' seems to be that we can survive even the worst catastrophe with everyday, secularized applications of faith, hope, and charity.

Only a fool says in his heart There is no Creator, no King of kings, Only mules would dare to bray These lethal mutterings. Over darkened minds as these The Darkness bears full sway, Fruitless, yet, bearing fruit, In their fell, destructive way. Sterile, though proliferate, A filthy progeny sees the day, When Evil, Thought and Action mate: Breeding sin, rebels and decay. The blackest deeds and foul ideals, Multiply throughout the earth, Through deadened, lifeless, braying souls, The Darkness labours and gives birth. Taking the Lord’s abundant gifts And rotting them to the core, They dress their dish and serve it out Foul seeds to infect thousands more. ‘The Tree of Life is dead!’ they cry, ‘And that of Knowledge not enough, Let us glut on the ashen apples Of Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Have pity on Thy children, Lord, Left sorrowing on this earth, While fools and all their kindred Cast shadows with their murk, And to the dwindling wise, They toss their heads and wryly smirk. The world daily grinds to dust Virtue’s fair unicorns, Rather, it would now beget Vice’s mutant manticores. Wisdom crushed, our joy is gone, Buried under anxious fears For lost rights and freedoms, We shed many bitter tears. Death is life, Life is no more, Humanity buried in a tomb, In a fatal prenatal world Where tiny flowers Are ripped from the womb, Discarded, thrown away, Inconvenient lives That barely bloomed. Our elders fare no better, Their wisdom unwanted by and by, Boarded out to end their days, And forsaken are left to die. Only the youthful and the useful, In this capital age prosper and fly. Yet, they too are quickly strangled, Before their future plans are met, Professions legally pre-enslaved Held bound by mounting student debt. Our leaders all harangue for peace Yet perpetrate the horror, Of economic greed shored up Through manufactured war. Our armies now welter In foreign civilian gore. How many of our kin are slain For hollow martial honour? As if we could forget, ignore, The scourge of nuclear power, Alas, victors are rarely tried For their woeful crimes of war. Hope and pray we never see A repeat of Hiroshima. No more! Crimes are legion, The deeds of devil-spawn! What has happened to the souls Your Divine Image was minted on? They are now recast: Crooked coins of Caesar and The Whore of Babylon. How often mankind shuts its ears To Your music celestial, Mankind would rather march To the anthems of Hell. If humanity cannot be reclaimed By Your Mercy and great Love Deservedly we should be struck By Vengeance from above. Many dread the Final Day, And the Crack of Doom For others the Apocalypse Will never come too soon. ‘Lift up your heads, be glad’, Fools shall bray no more For at last the Master comes To thresh His threshing floor.

We mortals are changeable. Alas, I must say more apt to change our minds when right than wrong. Wrong, we are stubborn indeed. Right, we are prone to vacillate and let opportunity escape.