Top 45 Alfred Bester Quotes
#1. I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought 'I can't wait for the future when the special effects are good' to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Jack Vance.
Matt Groening
#2. I'm treating you like a relative. I don't pay enough for the privilege.
Alfred Bester
#3. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution ... that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks.
Alfred Bester
#4. We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response ... mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves.
Alfred Bester
#5. The acid of fury ran through him, eating away the brute patience and sluggishness that had made a cipher of Gully Foyle, precipitating a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine of Gully Foyle. He was dedicated.
Alfred Bester
#6. The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal.
Alfred Bester
#7. Don't ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.
Alfred Bester
#8. The whole point of extravagance is to act like a fool and feel like a fool, but enjoy it.
Alfred Bester
#9. This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying ... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice ... but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks ... but nobody loved it.
Alfred Bester
#10. If you can have everything at fifty that you wanted when you were fifteen, you're happy.
Alfred Bester
#11. This is Armageddon ... Flowering Monstrosity. Tell me what you see." "There's
Alfred Bester
#12. He was afflicted with an education and a sense of humor. He was inspired by a purpose. He was armed with a phone book. He was doomed.
Alfred Bester
#13. The damnable frustration of revenge. Revenge is for dreams ... never for reality.
Alfred Bester
#14. I'm not a robot. I'm a freak of the universe ... a thinking animal ... and I'm trying to see my way clear through this morass.
Alfred Bester
#15. If a man's got talent and guts to buck society, he's obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you've got left are the sheep.
Alfred Bester
#16. I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great.
Alfred Bester
#17. You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
Alfred Bester
#18. Most science fiction, quite frankly, is silly nonsense.
Alfred Bester
#19. Faith in faith' he answered himself. 'It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.
Alfred Bester
#20. Be grateful that you only see the outward man. Be grateful that you never see the passions, the hatreds, the jealousies, the malice, the sicknesses ... Be grateful you rarely see the frightening truth in people.
Alfred Bester
#21. He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love.
Alfred Bester
#22. It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways.
Alfred Bester
#23. Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.
Alfred Bester
#24. One of the things that everybody knows about space travel but never mentions is its aphrodisiac quality.
Alfred Bester
#26. Damn you!" Dagenham raged, "Don't you realize that you can't trust people? They don't know enough for their own good." "Then let them learn or die. We're all in this together. Let's live or die together.
Alfred Bester
#27. You're all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory.
Alfred Bester
#28. Intellect is the ability to avoid belaboring the obvious.
Alfred Bester
#29. Eight, sir; seven, sir; Six, sir; five, sir; Four, sir; Three, sir; Two, sir; one! Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun.
Alfred Bester
#30. Millions for defense, but not one cent for survival.
Alfred Bester
#31. Century also had shelves of obsolete printed books.
Alfred Bester
#32. We don't punish criminals in our enlightened age, we cure 'em; and the cure is worse than punishment.
Alfred Bester
#33. I'm not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.
Alfred Bester
#34. Millions for nonsense, but not one cent for entropy.
Alfred Bester
#36. It was not exasperation.... It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.
Alfred Bester
#37. You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of the Holy Darwin. Most scientific.
Alfred Bester
#38. I'm a great believer in people and their untapped potential.
Alfred Bester
#40. I've handed life and death back to the people who do the living and the dying.
Alfred Bester
#41. The test of intellect is the refusal to belabor the obvious.
Alfred Bester
#43. It's obvious we can't all be a Gully Foyle, but most of us energize at such a low level, so far short of our real capabilities, we could all be more, do more.
Alfred Bester
#44. The mind is the reality. You are what you think.
Alfred Bester
#45. We always do what's natural, only sometimes we shouldn't do it.
Alfred Bester
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