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 BECKETTThe people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.
More Bernard Beckett Quotes
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Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
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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.
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A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.
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Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.
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… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.
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I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.
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I write with teenagers in mind.
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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.
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Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
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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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In the end, living is defined by dying.
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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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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.
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Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.
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Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.
BERNARD BECKETT