Brian Aldiss Quotes
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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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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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Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
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He let out a yell of joy. They danced round the room. Pressure of population was such that reproduction had to be strict, controlled. Childbirth required government permission. For this moment, they had waited four years. Incoherently they cried their delight.
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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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You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men; squeamish.
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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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Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.
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All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behavior and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all....Ah, well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?
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The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.
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At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.
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'Are you a religious man, Joe?'Flitch pulled a face. 'I leaves that sort of thing to women.'
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Frank's chromosome was now breeding as true as ever. Blood group, creed, colour of skin - nothing was proof against it. The numbers with shared consciousness, procreating for all they were worth, trebled every generation.
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Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane.
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Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It’s patriotic to overconsume.
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Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.
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Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.
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The ambition of the original Frank had not died; it had grown subtler. It had become a wish to sample everything. The more bodily habitations there were with which to sample, the more tantalizing the idea seemed: for many experiences, belonging only to one brief era, are never repeated, and may be gone before they are perceived and tasted.
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There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when it looked as if the intellect might win over the body, and our species become something worthwhile. But too much procreation killed that illusion.
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You were fool enough to think that one hundred and fifty million years either way made an ounce of difference to the muddle of thoughts in a man’s cerebral vortex.
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All the time, he hoped they would understand that his arrogance masked only shyness-or did he hope that it was his shyness which masked arrogance? He did not know.Who could presume to know? The one quality holds much of the other. Both refuse to come forward and share.
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The ability to change should not be despised.
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'There's a way outside. We're - we've got to find out what we are.' His voice rose to an hysterical pitch. He was shaking Calvin again. 'We must find out what's wrong here. Either we are victims of some ghastly experiment - or we're all monsters!'
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That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: 'Whatever has been done to me, I've been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I don't even know what it is. It's been a cheat, a cheat.…'