Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.
BERNARD BECKETTI write with teenagers in mind.
More Bernard Beckett Quotes
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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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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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A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.
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Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.
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Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.
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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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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.
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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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The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.
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Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
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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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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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… 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 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 BECKETT