Brian Aldiss Quotes
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'The intelligent have been overwhelmed by the dull. Is that not an invasion?''More, I would say, of a self-betrayal.'
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Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization?
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If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn’t be where we are now.
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Frank's chromosome conquered everywhere. Peace was guaranteed.By the end of another century's ruthless intermarriage, Russia and Asia were engulfed as thoroughly as Europe, and by the same loving methods. Billions of people: one consciousness.
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'You see life as a contrast between misery and pleasure, Jon; that is not a correct interpretation.''It’s a pretty good rule of thumb, I should have thought.''Thought and non-thought is the only valid line of comparison.''Bit of a bird’s-eye view, isn’t it? That puts us on the same level as the proles.''Exactly.'
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Synthetic life-forms were less than ten years old, the old android mechanicals less than sixteen; the faults of their systems were still being ironed out, year by year.
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Did the others here feel the disquiet he felt? Had they a reason for concealing that disquiet? And another question: Where was 'here'?He shut that one down sharply.Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorize your knowledge.
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One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backward in time.
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I kill from conviction, not to pass a personality quiz.
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I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.
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Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!
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Full of years, Sir Frank's body died. The diphtheria which carried him off caused him as much suffering as it would have done an ordinary man; dying was not eased by his unique gift. He slid out into the long darkness - but his consciousness continued unabated in eight other bodies.
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All of which pointed to a moral that they should have learned long before, Arthur thought: Never trust a bunch of lousy politicians to do your thinking for you.
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Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places.
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Let’s have a toast-to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!
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Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
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It i.e., his look held the fatal mixture of stupidity and cunning that lurks at the bottom of all evil.
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There have been mechanicals on the market with mini-computers for brains - plastic things without life, super-toys - but we have at last found a way to link computer circuitry with synthetic flesh.
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Carnage added to carnage does not equal peace.
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What would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?
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'They enjoy their show of might,' Adam said. 'These people have to express their unhappiness by using ugly things like guns and ill-fitting uniforms, and the whole conception of the camp.'
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You know why I am a prisoner-because the laws are so stupid that we prefer to break them than to live by them, although it means life-long imprisonment.
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As long as the chromosome reproduced itself in sufficient dominance, he was immortal! To him, in an unscientific age, the problem did not present itself quite like that; but he realized that there was a trait to be kept in the family.
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Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should - not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that 'here' and 'not here' seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.