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 BECKETTThe 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.
More Bernard Beckett Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.
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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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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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… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.
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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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The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.
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Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.
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Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
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Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.
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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.
BERNARD BECKETT