It isn’t one man in a million has that twist. Most men want—well, various things, but very few want knowledge for its own sake. I don’t, I know perfectly well.
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Context: Bedford teases Cavor about why he really does his research.
Source: Chapter 16: Points of View
Sometimes it seemed as though I sat through immeasurable eternities like some god upon a lotus leaf, and again as though there was a momentary pause as I leapt from moon to earth.
Grand Lunar: You mean to say … that you run about over the surface of your world—this world, whose riches you have scarcely begun to scrape—killing one another for beasts to eat?
There are no books, no records of any sort, no libraries or inscriptions. All knowledge is stored in distended brains much as the honey-ants of Texas store honey in their distended abdomens.
That wretched-looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course it is really in the end a far more…
Grand Lunar: But what good is this war? Cavor: Oh! as for good! … it thins the population! Grand Lunar: But why should there be a need—?
What did we come for? What are we after? What was the moon to us or we to the moon? We wanted too much, we tried too much. We ought to have started the little things first.