The 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.
BERNARD BECKETTSuperstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.
More Bernard Beckett Quotes
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Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.
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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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In the end, living is defined by dying.
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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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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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The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.
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The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
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Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
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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