Samuel R. Delany Quotes

The 21st century does not like tidy minds.

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human, and disorder is our worst enemy.

Well, it takes all kinds to make a mess.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

You always have to wrestle with chaos.

Disorder brings about order.

If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things.

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.

All the world does as it is supposed to, except for humans. Maybe that's why you so often want to kill each other.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.

At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.

The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness.

Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

The order I found was the order of disorder