Brian Aldiss Quotes
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They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?
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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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Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
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Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!
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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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Digging deep in a Martian desert men discovered an enormous brain. It suddenly started to think at them - So they covered it up again...
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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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I kill from conviction, not to pass a personality quiz.
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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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'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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I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.
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Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
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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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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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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.
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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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He gets bored with the effort of trying to think, and is unhappy because he knows thinking, or at least 'thinking-to-a-purpose' is on the black list of party activities.
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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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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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She had tried to love him.
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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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One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir.
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Many Franks of the sixteenth generation were killed in the muck of the trenches, he died not once but many times, developing an obsessive dread of war which never left him. By the time the Americans entered the war, he was turning his many thoughts to politics.
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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.