Category: Thought

For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.

J. G. Ballard, as interviewed by Jean-Paul Coillard, “JG Ballard: Theatre of Cruelty,” Disturb (1998).

Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life.

Alfred Bester, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1958; reprinted in The Dark Side of the Earth (1964) and David Hartwell, ed., The World Treasury of Science Fiction, p. 268.

Keep a government poor and weak and it’s your servant; when it is rich and powerful it becomes your master.

The character Colonel Andrew Jackson Hickock in H. Beam Piper‘s Lone Star Planet (1958). This short novel has been published as A Planet for Texans, too, and its story idea was suggested by an infamous H. L. Mencken squib.

Millions for defense, but not one cent for survival.

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination, Chapter 16. The novel was first published under its author’s preferred title, Tiger! Tiger! (1956), in Britain.

Chance, another word for destiny.

Philip José Farmer, The Dark Design (1977).

Le doute n’est pas un état bien agréable,
mais l’assurance est un état ridicule.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia (November 28, 1770). English: in S.G. Tallentyre (ed.), Voltaire in His Letters (1919), p. 232.

I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Ken Kesey, as quoted in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kook-Aid Acid Test (1968), Chapter One.

Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.

Widely cited on the Internet as by Niccolò Machiavelli and from The Prince (16th Century), this very “Machiavellian” instruction is nowhere to be found in The Prince, but its very citation may qualify as Machiavellian.

Maybe not you, buddy, but the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that’s the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn’t anybody laughing. I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Chapter Five.

L’homme doit être content, dit-on; mais de quoi?

Man ought to be content, it is said; but with what?

François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Pensées, Remarques, et Observations de Voltaire; ouvrage posthume (1802), p. 232.