Best 11 quotes of Pierre Boulle on MyQuotes

But once an original book has been written - and no more than one or two appear in a century - men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.

Stupefaction overrode all other emotion when I saw this creature on the lookout, lying in wait for the game. For it was an ape, a large-sized gorilla. It was in vain that I told myself I was losing my reason: I could entertain not the slightest doubt as to his species. But an encounter with a gorilla on the planet Soror was not the essential outlandishness of the situation. This for me lay in the fact that the ape was correctly dressed, like a man of our world, and above all that he wore his clothes in such an easy manner.

In the field of technology, simplification is always an enormous advance...

No country in the world can continue to spend what we are sacrificing for the moon without rapidly being reduced to utter ruin.

The army had little attraction for him, but it afforded him the possibility of taking a great step toward his goal. After all, if the military saw fit to replace the body that he was planning to liberate from the earth's gravity with an explosive charge, this was a mere detail, at any rate so far as the preliminary experiments were concerned. Creative science should be able to take advantage, without remorse, of the substantial sums allocated by destructive folly.

... the heritage of mankind is not the earth but the entire universe,

The man who eventually reached the moon would be traveling in a vessel made of earthly materials.

The moon, the serene moon, was creating a conflict of opinion in America almost as violent as the racial problem.

To rise from the national level to the level of mankind, I call that progress. And that's what's so admirable. For a man to progress, once he has reached the White House-I wouldn't have thought it possible.

When, in the fifteenth century, some audacious mariners who had sailed from Europe discovered America, nothing seemed to justify such a venture in the eyes of their contemporaries. Today, however, we can see it has given birth to the twentieth-century United States. Don't you think the existence of the United States constitutes a valid reason for Columbus's wild scheme...

You can ask a President to provide for two years ahead, maybe for twenty or even thirty years, but not for two hundred or a thousand!