Top 32 Bernard Beckett Quotes
#1. The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
Bernard Beckett
#2. Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.
Bernard Beckett
#5. Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.
Bernard Beckett
#7. A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.
Bernard Beckett
#8. The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.
Bernard Beckett
#10. Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.
Bernard Beckett
#11. I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.
Bernard Beckett
#13. I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.
Bernard Beckett
#14. From our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.
Bernard Beckett
#15. The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders.
Bernard Beckett
#16. Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
Bernard Beckett
#17. Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
Bernard Beckett
#18. You're still just silicon," he said, as he turned the page.
"And you're just carbon," Art persevered. "Since when has the periodic table been grounds for discrimination?
Bernard Beckett
#20. The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes.
Bernard Beckett
#21. We have nothing but a history of our own invention to support this view. It suits us to believe it. It allows us to mistreat them, but convenience is not truth.
Bernard Beckett
#22. 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.
Bernard Beckett
#23. Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.
Bernard Beckett
#24. I can't see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but there's no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief.
Bernard Beckett
#25. I'm a school teacher, and later on, well past my formal education, I became very interested in science.
Bernard Beckett
#26. What about an amnesiac, who awakes having lost his memories and must learn of his past from scratch? Has he died? How can we be just memories? How does that leave us with enough?
Bernard Beckett
#27. But time passes. Fear becomes a memory. Terror becomes routine; it loses its grip.
Bernard Beckett
#28. 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.
Bernard Beckett
#29. There is a fascination with fear. It grabs our attention.
Bernard Beckett
#30. 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.
Bernard Beckett
#32. I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.
Bernard Beckett
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