… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.
BERNARD BECKETTIn the end, living is defined by dying.
More Bernard Beckett Quotes
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I just love the idea that people disappear into the story for a while. You grab a book, and you want to get back to it, and your life becomes a bit of an interruption. I would love readers to feel like that.
BERNARD BECKETT -
Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
BERNARD BECKETT -
In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.
BERNARD BECKETT -
And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.
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Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. Its very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover Gods great plan.
BERNARD BECKETT -
The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.
BERNARD BECKETT -
The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name.
BERNARD BECKETT -
The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
BERNARD BECKETT -
This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.
BERNARD BECKETT -
Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.
BERNARD BECKETT -
Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.
BERNARD BECKETT -
Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.
BERNARD BECKETT -
I cant see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but theres no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief.
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I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.
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I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.
BERNARD BECKETT