Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.
BERNARD BECKETTI 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.
More Bernard Beckett Quotes
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A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.
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 -
Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence.
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.
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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 -
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.
BERNARD BECKETT -
Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.
BERNARD BECKETT -
I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.
BERNARD BECKETT -
In the end, living is defined by dying.
BERNARD BECKETT -
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 -
Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.
BERNARD BECKETT -
Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
BERNARD BECKETT -
… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.
BERNARD BECKETT -
The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.
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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