"I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed."
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Quote collection
Bernard Beckett quotes (page 1 of 2)
27 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host."
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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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"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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"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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"... 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 write with teenagers in mind."
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"In the end, living is defined by dying."
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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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"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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"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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"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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"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. 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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"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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"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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"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. 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."
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