Brian Aldiss citations

Page 2

“Le besoin humain est réellement, profondément, de trouver un sens à la vie.”

“Les évènement contrôlent tout.”

“Les gens qui ont été souvent trahis se croient souvent des traîtres.”

“Ce qui occupe le plus de place chez l'homme, c'est la mort.”

“Contrairement à la vertu, la violence survit longtemps à ceux qui l'ont manifesté.”

“Mais il est notoire que la mémoire des anciens est capricieuse. A travers leurs souvenirs, leur lointaine enfance est le jouet d'étranges déformations.”

“Voler la mémoire, c'est une forme de meurtre.”

“L'imagination est toujours avide, elle en veut toujours davantage.”

“Quand nous espérons pour les autres, nous sommes invariablement déçus. Nos rêves n'ont juridiction que sur nous-mêmes.”

“Nous sommes tous condamnés à penser et à dire ce que nous avons dit et pensé hier.”

“La vérité n'a jamais libéré personne.”

“Il vaut mieux un monde peuplé de monstres qu'un monde mort.”

“L'histoire des nations se précipite comme une rivière, au-delà du contrôle individuel.”

“Nous avons besoin de nos désastres.”

“Mais où que vous viviez, en quelque lieu, en quelque temps que ce soit, vous ne vous affranchirez pas de la souffrance. Dans l'univers, la vie de chacun est un fastidieux et pénible voyage.”

“L'injustice fait partie de la loi naturelle.”

“Tâche toujours à te réaliser pour t'affranchir de tout conflit interne.”

“Un désir malfaisant qu'on refoule se multiplie et dévore l'esprit dans lequel il a germé.”

“Qui parmi nous est réellement libre?”

“Mais ce que croient les autres gens, et leurs passions nous paraissent toujours insensés.”

“Mais l'instinct ne va pas toujours de pair avec l'intelligence.”

“La science explique peut-être les propriétés physiques de la lumière du jour. Personne ne peut expliquer le miracle qu'elle est.”

“Plus on vieillit, plus on a besoin de ses amis.”

“Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.”

“-""Expansion to your ego, friend"".
-""At your expense"".”

“If you think with your emotions, slight glandular changes are sufficient to revise your entire outlook.”

“Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contra-terrene caverns of your fee-fi-fo-fumblingly fearful id!”

“If adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it!”

“The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones.”

“I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.”

“The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterward, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone.”

“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.”

“You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men; squeamish.”

“Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.”

“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.”

“At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.”

“The day of the android has dawned.”

“Never, never let action become a substitute for thought.”

“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.”

“It’s a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn’t; it’s something that goes on inside us.”

“Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.”

“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.”

“Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!”

“One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backward in time.”

“It [i. e., his look] held the fatal mixture of stupidity and cunning that lurks at the bottom of all evil.”

“I’ve no objection to morality, except that it’s obsolete.”

“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.”

“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.”

“However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can.”

“That’s one thing about these religious boys—they reckon that if they are on God’s side, then the enemy must be on the devil’s, and so they have no qualms about giving it to ’em hot and strong.”

“Many modifications in private and public life took place. Privacy ceasing to exist, all new houses were glass-built, curtains abolished, walls pulled down. Police went, the entire legal structure vanished overnight — a man does not litigate against himself. A parody of Parliament remained, to deal with foreign affairs, but party politics, elections, leaders in newspapers (even newspapers themselves) were scrapped.”

“Frank II liked Spain. Philip's capital was gayer, warmer, and more sanitary than London. It was intoxicating to enjoy the best of both courts. It proved also extremely remunerative: the shared consciousness of Frank I and II was by far the quickest communicational link between the two rival countries, and as such was worth money. Not that Frank revealed his secret to a soul, but he let it be known he had a fleet of capable spies who moved without risk of detection between England and Spain. Burly Lord Burleigh beamed upon him. So did the Duke of Medina Sidonia.”