Quotes about alien (673 quotes, page 7)

“Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own rightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

In Quest of Democracy (1991)
Context: Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own rightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent. And all the time the desire grows for a system which will lift them from the position of 'rice-eating robots' to the status of human beings who can think and speak freely and hold their heads high in the security of their rights.

People , Fear , Idea , Learning

“The problem they had to solve was the same as any messianic movement: how to exist with an alien culture yet remain spiritually autonomous.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: The Ghost Dance made its unfulfillable promises at a time when the Indians were ready to rebel. The teachings of the Native American Church spread at a time when the Indians were ready to admit defeat.... The problem they had to solve was the same as any messianic movement: how to exist with an alien culture yet remain spiritually autonomous. The solution had been to borrow freely from White culture while salvaging what is considered important in Indian religious thought.<!-- p. 269

Problem

“A school of artistic experimentation is invented, which is said to be the definition of freedom; but this “experimentation” has its limits, imperceptible until there is a clash, that is, until the real problems of individual alienation arise.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)
Context: A school of artistic experimentation is invented, which is said to be the definition of freedom; but this “experimentation” has its limits, imperceptible until there is a clash, that is, until the real problems of individual alienation arise. Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated. Those who play by the rules of the game are showered with honors — such honors as a monkey might get for performing pirouettes. The condition is that one does not try to escape from the invisible cage.

School , Problem , Freedom

“Fellowship depends on appreciation while manipulation is the cause of alienation”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5
Context: Fellowship depends on appreciation while manipulation is the cause of alienation: objects and I apart, things stand dead, and I am alone. What is more decisive: a life of manipulation distorts the image of the world. Reality is equated with availability: What I can manipulate is, what I cannot manipulate is not. A life of manipulation is the death of transcendence.

Dependency

“The history and the geographical distribution of the myth are uncertain, but for several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility—on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere "creatures" who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the physical world. We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the "harmony of contained conflicts" in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being. In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies—leaving "I" as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 78

God , World , History , Fish

“Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

What is Enlightenment? (1784)
Context: Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!

Nature , Parting

“I'm a rootless man, but I'm neither psychologically distraught nor in any wise particularly perturbed because of it. Personally, I do not hanker after, and seem not to need, as many emotional attachments, sustaining roots, or idealistic allegiances as most people. I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment, of aloneness; it does not bother me; indeed, to me it seems the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it. I can make myself at home almost anywhere on this earth and can, if I've a mind to and when I'm attracted to a landscape or a mood of life, easily sink myself into the most alien and widely differing environments.”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

White Man, Listen! (1957)

Life , People , Home , Mood

“He is the Grand Master, A.E. can Vogt, weaver of a thousand ideas per plot-line, creator of alien thoughts and impossible dreams that rival the best ever built by our kind.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

In recognition of van Vogt receiving the Grand Master designation in 1996, in The Nebula Awards Vol. 31, as quoted in SF Authors Remember A.E. van Vogt (2000) http://www.sfrevu.com/ISSUES/2000/ARTICLES/20000128-03.htm#SF%20Authors%20Remeber%20A.E.%20van%20Vogt
Context: Even the brightest star shines dimly when observed-from too far away. And human memory is notoriously unreliable. And we live in ugly times when all respect for that which has gone before suffers crib death beneath the weight of youthful arrogance and ignorance. But a great nobility has at last, been recognized and lauded. Someone less charitable than I might suggest the honor could have been better appreciated had it not been so tardy, naming its race with a foe that blots joy and destroys short-term memory. But I sing the Talent Electric, and like aft the dark smudges of history, everything but the honor and die achievement remains for the myth-makers.
Alfred E. van Vogt has been awarded the Grand Master trophy of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is not the to first person to receive this singular accolade…given only to those whose right to possess it is beyond argument or mitigation.
Were we in 1946 or even 1956, van Vogt would have already been able to hold the award aloft. Had SFWA existed then and had the greatest living sf authors been polled as to who was the most fecund, the most intriguing, the mast innovative the most influential of their number, Isaac and Arthur and Cyril and Hank Kuttner and Ron Hubbard would all have pointed to the same man, and Bob Heinlein would've given him a thumbs-up. Van Vogt was the pinnacle, the source of power and ideas; the writer to beat. Because he embodied in his astonishing novels and assorted stories what we always say is of prime importance to us in this genre-the much vaunted Sense of Wonder.
Van Vogt was the wellspring of wonder. … That's how important he was. … And then came the dark years during which the man was shamefully agented and overlooked; and even the brightest star loses its piercing light if observed through the thickening mists of time and flawed memory.
Now it is lifetimes later, and the great award has, at last, been presented. To some, less charitable than I, something could be said about a day late and a dollar short, but not I. I am here to sing the Talent Electric, and it is better now than never. He is the Grand Master, A. E. can Vogt, weaver of a thousand ideas per plot-line, creator of alien thoughts and impossible dreams that rival the best ever built by our kind.
This dear, gentlemanly writer whose stories can still kill you with a concept or warm you with a character, now joins the special pantheon.

Dreams , Idea

“Why should a poet pray thus? poets scorn
The boundaried love of country, being free
Of winds, and alien lands, and distances,
Vagabonds of the compass, wayfarers,
Pilgrims of thought, the tongues of Pentecost
Their privilege”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

Winter, p. 4
The Land (1926)
Context: Why should a poet pray thus? poets scorn
The boundaried love of country, being free
Of winds, and alien lands, and distances,
Vagabonds of the compass, wayfarers,
Pilgrims of thought, the tongues of Pentecost
Their privilege, and in the peddler's pack
The curious treasures of their stock-in-trade,
Bossy and singular, the heritage
Of poetry and science, polished bright,
Thin with the rubbing of too many hands;
Myth, glamour, hazard, fables dim as age,
Faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair,
Wings, and great waters, and Promethean fire,
Man's hand to clasp, and Helen's mouth to kiss.
Why then in little meadows hedge about
A poet's pasture? shed a poet's cloak
For fustian? cede a birthright, thus to map
So small a corner of so great a world?

Love , Country

“Without the body and the mind, as all men know, the Nation could not live. But if the spirit of America were killed, even though the Nation's body and mind, constricted in an alien world, lived on, the America we know would have perished.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, Third Inaugural Address (1941)
Context: But it is not enough to achieve these purposes alone. It is not enough to clothe and feed the body of this Nation, and instruct and inform its mind. For there is also the spirit. And of the three, the greatest is the spirit. Without the body and the mind, as all men know, the Nation could not live. But if the spirit of America were killed, even though the Nation's body and mind, constricted in an alien world, lived on, the America we know would have perished.

Men , World

“Now, whatever those ideas may produce for those countries, what I want to warn you about is that neither of those ideas can ever do anything to help our country in solving her own constitutional problems. They are exotic to this country. They are alien. You could not graft them on to our system any more than you could graft a Siberian crab on an oak.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Bewdley Unionist Association in Worcester (10 April 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 100-101.
1937
Context: ... ideas may be very dangerous things. There is no country in Europe that has a constitution comparable to ours. I do not mean by using that word "comparable" that I am assuming that ours is the best. I merely affirm that they have been all different; that there is no constitution like ours, which has evolved through the centuries into the constitution as we know it to-day. Therefore it is a more easy matter for ideas to sweep people off their feet in those countries. Throughout the whole of Russia, and of Germany and Italy, you have peoples numbering hundreds of millions who are governed by ideas alien to the ideas which we hold in this country. They are the ideas of Communism and of differing forms of Fascism. Now, whatever those ideas may produce for those countries, what I want to warn you about is that neither of those ideas can ever do anything to help our country in solving her own constitutional problems. They are exotic to this country. They are alien. You could not graft them on to our system any more than you could graft a Siberian crab on an oak.

Idea , Problem , Help , Country

“Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 483
Context: Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, ie, concernedly and "responsibly." one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man.

Faith , Faith , Optimism , Despair

“The individual will reach total consciousness as a social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)
Context: The individual will reach total consciousness as a social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of one's true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one's own human condition through culture and art.

“And I, as I lived, in an alien land
Will die a slave and an orphan.”

Mikhail Lermontov book The Novice

"The Novice" (1839)
Poems

“I hear there are people who actually enjoy moving. Sounds like a disease to me - they must be unstable. Though it does have it’s poetry, I’ll allow that. When an old dwelling starts looking desolate, a mixture of regret and anxiety comes over us and we feel like we are leaving a safe harbor for the rolling sea. As for the new place, it looks on us with alien eyes, it has nothing to say to us, it is cold.”

Jan Neruda (1834–1891) Czech poet, theater reviewer, publicist and writer

Sea , People , Feeling , Disease

“A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow.”

Michael Burleigh (1955) American historian and writer

Source: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror (2006), p. 415

Housing , Understanding , Communication , Thinking

“Many people were bitterly puzzled that the first truly intelligent aliens to be found should be so immediately, unremittingly hostile, but the astronomers shrugged it off. The universe was at best a marginal place for life.”

Paul J. McAuley (1955) British writer

Source: Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), Chapter 1 “Camp Zero” (p. 38)

Hostility , Intelligence , People , Universe

“I specially wish you not to go away with the idea that the exercise of scientific thought is properly confined... When the Roman jurists applied their experience of Roman citizens to dealings between citizens and aliens, showing by the difference of their actions that they regarded the circumstances as essentially different, they laid the foundations of that great structure which has guided the social progress of Europe. That procedure was an instance of strictly scientific thought. When a poet finds that he has to move a strange new world which his predecessors have not moved; when, nevertheless, he catches fire from their flashes, arms from their armoury, sustentation from their foot-prints, the procedure by which he applies old experience to new circumstances is nothing greater or less than scientific thought. When the moralist studying the conditions of society and the ideas of right and wrong which have come down to us from a time when war was the normal condition of man and success in war the only chance of survival, evolves from them the conditions and ideas which must accompany a time of peace, when the comradeship of equals is the condition of national success; the process by which he does this is scientific thought and nothing else.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: "On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought" (Aug 19, 1872), pp. 156-157.

Peace , Chance , Study , Time

“My main concern was to write a novel that uses all of this stuff that is accessible, to write a novel that deals with white racism and Chinese American history and the real Chinese fairy tales and the heroic tradition, and to demonstrate that a Chinese American could do all of this without sending whites up the wall or alienating anybody…”

Frank Chin (1940) American writer

On his novel Donald Duk (as quoted in ““FRANK CHIN: HIS OWN VOICE” https://resisters.com/by-frank-abe/frank-chin-his-own-voice/ in the Bloombury Review; September 1991)

History

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

"The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic ideas", p. 26
The Denial of Death (1973)

Time , Housing , Food , Star

“Discrimination isn’t always gender, race or colour-based. The most damaging discrimination is of the mind and ideology. I was discriminated against by almost all my Bollywood friends, whom I used to hang around with because, like them, I also believed in a certain ideology but found it fake and alienated from reality, and elitist.”

Vivek Agnihotri (1973) director

Urban Naxals (2018)

Reality

“There is the chance, too, if we have the imagination to see it, to resurrect the vitality of European civilisation and give to our new generation of Europeans the inspiration to set against the alien but undeniably dynamic, almost religious, creed of Communism. At this point in time when we are seeking reconciliation and yet are faced with increasing evidence of militancy everywhere, I look to an active European Community as a necessary complement to the NATO Alliance.”

Alec Douglas-Home (1903–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1975/apr/21/european-community-membership#S5LV0359P0_19750421_HOL_73 in the House of Lords (21 April 1975)
Later life

Imagination , Chance , Time , Communication

“Do you know what goes on at Skull & Bones? I have a family audience, so I can’t say it. They have sexual rituals– some of the most ancient Egyptian rituals– where they believe they are possessed by entities. Basically, space aliens.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"John Kerry had sex in coffins hundreds of times in Satanic ritual" https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=135&v=5aeLkXDvO-g, September 2013
2013

Family

“The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 14, “Appointment in Samarra” (p. 283)

Dreams , Mathematics , Time , Communication

“Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to…well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let’s call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it’s possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it’s possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 12, “Power Breakfast” (p. 254)

Universe , Law , Nature

“I believe aliens have definitely been here. I don’t think the theory that they have affected, interacted with, exchanged with the people of Earth (human and otherwise) in the past takes away from the accomplishments or innovations of anyone. I think the general belief that certain peoples are less than other peoples is what does that…”

Nnedi Okorafor (1974) Nigerian-American writer of fantasy and science fiction

On her belief about extraterrestrial life in “Interview: Nnedi Okorafor” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-nnedi-okorafor/ in Lightspeed Science Fiction & Fantasy (Mar 2017)
Personal life

Past , Thinking , People

“The two main parties feared the SDP more than they feared each other. Their narrow dogmas had alienated more and more people and would never achieve a widening appeal across classes, regions and occupations. They had replied by trying to pretend that the SDP was all things to all men and women. It was not true. … It had no place for class warriors or for those who wanted to fight outdated ideological battles; no place for little Englanders; for those selfishly concerned with their own problems and not with those of their neighbours and the nation as a whole. The Labour Party went increasingly into its chauvinist bunker and the Conservative Party showed little or no concern for the problems of the developing and poor nations.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech in Kensington (14 February 1982), quoted in The Times (15 February 1982), p. 4
1980s

People , Problem , Fight , Fear

“I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast pitiless Mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence; and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 16: How the Beast Folk Tasted Blood

Pain , Faith , Drink , Fate

“I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world… True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion… We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda… They have alienated many from learning about Islam. True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

"Presidential Candidates Proposing to Ban Muslim Immigration to the United States" http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/muhammad-ali-hits-trump-misguided-murderers-sabotaging-islam-n477351 (9 December 2015).

Religion , Personality , People , Learning

“The egg is breaking, the chromosomes are splitting to go forward with a new pattern of life. Those of us who seem most alien... are the ones who are going forward to create the life as yet inchoate. We who are affected cannot make ourselves clear… This is the era when apocalyptic visions are to be fulfilled. We are on the brink of a new life, entering a new domain. In what language can we describe things for which there are as yet no new names? And how describe relations? We can only divine the nature of those to whom we are attracted, the forces to which we willingly yield obedience....”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Life , Making love , Relation ships , Nature

“Any type of violence initiated by one intelligent being against another was wrong. Killing violence was worse than any other kind. How could it be condoned? In his brief moment of cosmic bliss, Khadaji had seen the value of intelligent life. Man and his self-created mues were alone in the galaxy as evolved intelligence. Certainly, there were artificials—computers and genetically altered animals—but no aliens had been discovered above the level of an unaltered dog. It was a big galaxy, plenty of room for every human or neo-human, it wasn’t necessary to kill any of them!”

Steve Perry book The Man Who Never Missed

Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 131)

Dogs , Intelligence , Animals , Self-confidence

“These kinds of habits, in good company, are so very nauseous and disgusting, that if we indulge ourselves in them, no one can be very fond of our acquaintance. So far from it, that even those, who are inclined to wish us well, must, by these and the like disagreeable customs, be entirely alienated from us.”

Giovanni della Casa (1503–1556) Roman Catholic archbishop

Those ill-bred people, who expect their acquaintance to love and caress them, with all their foibles, are as absurd as a poor ragged cinder-wench; who should roll about upon an heap of ashes, scrabbling and throwing dust in the face of every one that passed by; and yet flatter herself that she should allure some youth to her embraces, by these dirty endearments; which would infallibly keep him at a distance.
Source: Galateo: Or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners, p. 15

“Quotes from the Riverworld series of novels and stories, about nearly all of humanity finding themselves resurrected on an alien world, for such reasons or purposes as remains unclear.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

The Riverworld series

World , Quotes

“From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed of shores of knowing.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Knowledge , Life

“There is a certain amount of sham in shamanism. There is a certain amount of theatre. It’s as loosely knit as that. We’re sort of coming out of the closet a bit more over the next couple of years. We’re going to be bringing out – manifesto’s too pushy a word – if it’s a theatre of marvels, we’re bringing out a theatre programme in the next couple of years. We’re working on it at the moment – our unified field theory of spookiness where we try to explain everything from language, consciousness, grey aliens to Rosicrucianism or whatever. It is a grand, mad theory which I’m working my best on at the moment to make it rational. It is an anti-rationalistic theory but I’m trying to couch it in rational terms so that it is not as insular as a lot of magic stuff.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Madness , Making love

“The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound—that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self.”

Greg Bear (1951) American writer best known for science fiction

We are all aliens to each other, all different and divided. We are even aliens to ourselves at different stages of our lives. Do any of us remember precisely what it was like to be a baby?
"Introduction to 'Plague of Conscience'", The Collected Stories of Greg Bear (2002)

Self-confidence , Science , Understanding

“Still, as I mused, the naked room,
The alien firelight died away;
And from the midst of cheerless gloom
I passed to bright, unclouded day.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

Stanza vi.
A Little While, a Little While (1846)

“The aliens that sent the protomolecule hadn’t needed to destroy humanity. They’d given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they’d leaped on it.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 27 (pp. 291-292)

“Undocumented aliens unfortunately are not protected by the law and they are tremendously subjected to exploitation. The result is that they would be willing to work for a wage that no person who is welcome in our shores would, would take. I think the answer to that problem is in Congress' lap. People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship and if that happened, then they wouldn't be prey to the employers who say "we want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else."”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

"Interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg", The Takeaway (16 September 2013) https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-09-16/transcript-interview-supreme-court-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg
2010s

Law , Personality , People , Problem

“The Prescription: We must face our pain and conflict. Until we quit denying our failures and muffling our uneasiness, until we confess our bewilderment and alienation, we can't take the next and necessary steps. The political system needs to be transformed, not reformed.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

Pain , Failure

“Shedding tears we spend the night in this deepening dark,
Our day is but a long struggle against an uphill path,
Not a single moment goes when we don't bewail our lot,
Lo! we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls.
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
We wish you well, O friends, leave you to His care,
And entrust our Qaiser Bagh to the blowing air,
While we give our tender heart to terror and despair.
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
I am betrayed by my friends, whom should I excuse?
Except God the gracious, I have no refuge,
I can't escape exile, under any excuse.
Lo, we cast a lingering look on the doors and wells,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
I have been told this much too, ah! the scourage of time!
The servant calls his master 'mad,' a travesty of the mind.
As for me, I cannoy help, but rot in alien climes.
Lo, we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are gong afar!
This is the cause of my regret, to whom should I complain?
What wondrous goods of mine are subjected to disdain,
My exile has raised a storm in the whole domain.
Lo we cast a lingering look on the doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
You cannot help but suffer, O heart, the sharp strings of grief,
They didn't spare even the things essential for the mourning meets,
In the scorching summer heat, I've no cover or sheet.
Akhtar now departs from all his friends and mates,
There is little time or need to dwell upon my fate,
Save, O God, my countrymen from the dangers lying in wait!
Lo, we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!”

Wajid Ali Shah (1822–1887) Nawab of Awadh

Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry, p. 63-67
Poetry

Despair , God , Time , Night

“I’m shocked at the countless hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent over the years in the desperate and fruitless search for extraterrestrial life... Of course, secularists are desperate to find life in outer space, as they believe that would provide evidence that life can evolve in different locations and given the supposed right conditions! The search for extraterrestrial life is really driven by man’s rebellion against God in a desperate attempt to supposedly prove evolution!... And I do believe there can’t be other intelligent beings in outer space because of the meaning of the gospel. You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation. One day, the whole universe will be judged by fire, and there will be a new heavens and earth. God’s Son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the “Godman,” to be our relative, and to be the perfect sacrifice for sin—the Savior of mankind. Jesus did not become the “GodKlingon” or the “GodMartian!””

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Only descendants of Adam can be saved. God’s Son remains the “Godman” as our Savior. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that we see the Father through the Son (and we see the Son through His Word). To suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong. An understanding of the gospel makes it clear that salvation through Christ is only for the Adamic race—human beings who are all descendants of Adam.

"We'll find a new Earth within 20 years" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/07/20/well-find-a-new-earth-within-20-years/, Around the World with Ken Ham (July 20, 2014)
2010s, Around the World with Ken Ham

God , History , Search , Intelligence

“Only on the sports field are the British an alien tribe.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Source: Leader of the Opposition (2009-2015), Battlelines book, (2013), p.8.

Sport

“Even godlike aliens have to act rationally—don’t they?”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I can’t recall ever meeting any.”

Chapter 18 (p. 301)
Pushing Ice (2005)

“Our present-day neurochemical cocktail, we are asked to believe, is the medium through which alien realms of consciousness can be grasped and neutrally appraised from a third-person perspective. Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve.”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

" Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream https://www.hedweb.com/bokowfil.htm", BLTC Research (2009)

Personality , Optimism

“We have been alienated by costs that soared beyond the means of all but the well-insured or wealthy; by specialization and the cold, quantifying approach that brushes past human concerns, and by the growing despair that comes from spending without regaining health.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves, p. 244

Despair , Past , Health

“It felt uncomfortably foreign, I would say. Obviously, it was the first time I had been in a country where everybody looked like me. But obviously, culturally, it was completely alien. And I found people in the street in St. Kitts actually were calling me "English"..”

Caryl Phillips (1958) Kittian-British writer

On returning to St. Kitts during his 20s after emigrating to England with her parents during childhood in “'Lost Child' Author Caryl Phillips: 'I Needed To Know Where I Came From'” https://www.npr.org/2015/03/21/394127475/lost-child-author-caryl-phillips-i-needed-to-know-where-i-came-from in NPR (2015 Mar 21)

Time , People , Country

“The I-breakdown, sweet, deep craved
You give it to me: already my throat is raw,
Already I hear the alien sound
Rebuilding unspoken images of my I.”

Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) German novelist, poet

Original: (de) Den Ich-zerfall, den süßen, tiefersehnten,
Den gibst Du mir: schon ist die Kehle rauh,
Schon ist der fremde Klang an unerwähnten
Gebilden meines Ichs am Unterbau.

"Cocaine" (1917)

“We must remember that they are alien.”

Paul J. McAuley (1955) British writer

“That’s hardly a basis for speculation now. It explains everything and nothing.”

Chapter 2 “The Hold” (p. 70)
Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988)

“…as we become more alienated from the things we consume, especially while buying online, the out-of-sight,out-of-mind problem becomes more intense.”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On consumers being willing to avoid abuses in “Wage Theft, Slavery, and Climate Change on the Outlaw Ocean” https://civileats.com/2019/09/27/wage-theft-slavery-and-climate-change-on-the-outlaw-ocean/ (Civil Eats; 2019 Sep 27)

Problem

“I'm a living corpse, untombed, undraped,
Unwelcome in the alien land, exiled from home and hearth.”

Fani Badayuni (1879–1961) Indian writer

Original: (ur) فانی ؔ ہم تو جیتے جی وہ میت ہیں بے گور و کفن
غربت جس کو راس نہ آئی اور وطن بھی چُھوٹ گیا

Fani, Urdu Ghazals: An Anthology from 16th to 20th century, p. 226

Home

“When the first alien spacecraft lands in Washington, I want the little green people to walk first into the National Gallery of Art. I want our art to explain who and what we are before our leaders do.”

Bran Ferren (1953) American technologist

Source: The New York Times Magazine, The Creators, 1999 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m4/ferren.html

People , Art

“One of the most dangerous words is 'extremist'. A person who commits acts of violence is not an 'extremist'; he is a criminal. If he commits those acts of violence with the object of detaching part of the territory of the United Kingdom and attaching it to a foreign country, he is an enemy under arms. There is the world of difference between a citizen who commits a crime, in the belief, however mistaken, that he is thereby helping to preserve the integrity of his country and his right to remain a subject of his sovereign, and a person, be he citizen or alien, who commits a crime with the intention of destroying that integrity and rendering impossible that allegiance. The former breaches the peace; the latter is executing an act of war. The use of the word 'extremist' of either or both conveys a dangerous untruth: it implies that both hold acceptable opinions and seek permissible ends, only that they carry them to 'extremes'. Not so: the one is a lawbreaker; the other is an enemy.The same purpose, that of rendering friend and foe indistinguishable, is achieved by references to the 'impartiality' of the British troops and to their function as 'keeping the peace.'”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The British forces are in Northern Ireland because an avowed enemy is using force of arms to break down lawful authority in the province and thereby seize control. The army cannot be 'impartial' towards an enemy, nor between the aggressor and the aggressed: they are not glorified policemen, restraining two sets of citizens who might otherwise do one another harm, and duty bound to show no 'partiality' towards one lawbreaker rather than another. They are engaged in defeating an armed attack upon the state. Once again, the terminology is designed to obliterate the vital difference between friend and enemy, loyal and disloyal.</p><p>Then there are the 'no-go' areas which have existed for the past eighteen months. It would be incredible, if it had not actually happened, that for a year and a half there should be areas in the United Kingdom where the Queen's writ does not run and where the citizen is protected, if protected at all, by persons and powers unknown to the law. If these areas were described as what they are—namely, pockets of territory occupied by the enemy, as surely as if they had been captured and held by parachute troops—then perhaps it would be realised how preposterous is the situation. In fact the policy of refraining from the re-establishment of civil government in these areas is as wise as it would be to leave enemy posts undisturbed behind one's lines.</p>
Source: Speech to the South Buckinghamshire Conservative Women's Annual Luncheon in Beaconsfield (19 March 1971), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (1991), pp. 487-488

Peace , Country , War , Personality

“Look at the solar system, and look at the Earth. On Earth, there are many intelligent species, but only one has achieved technology. Right here in the journey of our own solar system, there is a very, very powerful message that says here's how we should look for alien life, small and big. So yeah, microbes are talking and we are listening, and they are taking us, one planet at a time and one moon at a time, towards their big brothers out there. And they are telling us about diversity, they are telling us about abundance of life, and they are telling us how this life has survived thus far to reach civilization, intelligence, technology and, indeed, philosophy.”

Nathalie Cabrol (1963) French American astrobiologist

Source: How Mars might hold the secret to the origin of life https://www.ted.com/talks/nathalie_cabrol_how_mars_might_hold_the_secret_to_the_origin_of_life (March 2015)

Life , Intelligence , Time

“Aliens is an amazing thing in my pocket, a landmark thing. On my gravestone it’ll say, “Well, his career wasn’t that great, but he did Aliens.””

Daniel Kash (1959) Canadian actor

Daniel Kash interview: Aliens’ Private Spunkmeyer https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/daniel-kash-interview-aliens-private-spunkymeyer/ (November 6, 2012)

“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 830)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

Intelligence

“The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well adjusted to!”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Thinking , Parent , Children , Stupidity

“One of the ironies in social climbing is that if you are successful, your children will ultimately belong to a different class from yours. There is something sad in that this was your ambition, yet if you achieve it, you have in a sense alienated yourself from your own children.”

Julian Fellowes (1949) English actor, dramatist, director, novelist, producer and screenwriter

Q&A with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes https://britishheritage.com/interviews/downton-abbey-julian-fellowes (July 22, 2021)

Success , Children , Sense , Sadness

“Anyone who’d volunteer for alien domination doesn’t really deserve to have his or her freedom.”

Rudy Rucker book Master of Space and Time

Source: Master of Space and Time (1984), Chapter 16, “Blue Gluons” (p. 126)

Freedom

“But humans had to learn to ignore appearance. No two beings who shared common thinking processes and common goals should be truly alien to each other.”

Charles Sheffield book Summertide

Source: The Heritage Universe, Summertide (1990), Chapter 5, “Summertide Minus Thirty” (p. 61)

Learning , Thinking , Appearance

“To categorize some people as indigenous and others as alien, to argue about the identity of the first inhabitants of the subcontinent, and to try and sort out these categories for the remote past, is to attempt the impossible.”

Romila Thapar (1931) Indian historian

Introduction, xxiv.
Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

Past , People

“Hindus accept no divisions between the believer and unbeliever. Every path leads to Him (God or Reality); there can be as many paths to Him as the number of human. Indeed, the prophetic tradition is alien to Hinduism. Narrowness of the spirit, peculiar to Semitic faiths, has been alien to India.”

Girilal Jain (1924–1993) Indian journalist

Source: The Hindu Phenomenon - By Girilal Jain p 5 -135 - South Asia Books - 1998 ISBN 8174760105

God , Faith , Reality

“The search for alien artefacts in the Solar System should be a perfectly legitimate branch of science ('exoarchaeology'?). Unfortunately, it has been largely discredited by claims that such evidence has already been found - and has been deliberately suppressed by NASA!”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

1990s, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), p. 97, Acknowledgements

Search , Science

“In recent decades the effects of environmental change on insect populations has been the focus of my research. It is widely recognised that invasive alien species, climate change and habitat destruction are all major players in the declines of many insects. Ladybirds are no exception.”

Helen Roy (1969) British ecologist and entomologist

Source: Ladybirds: an interview with Helen Roy, Ecological Entomologist at the BRC https://www.nhbs.com/blog/ladybirds-helen-roy (14 May 2013)

Change

“When Divine providence graces you, and you are endowed with passion of love and alienated from your ego, at that time Divine love enters your inmost being and He shows His Beauty to you.”

Bu Ali Shah Qalandar (1209–1324) Indian Sufi saint

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 270

Time , Beauty , Passion , Love

“Communion with God is conferred after the dervish has become alien to all else.”

Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki (1173–1235) Indian Sufi

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 263

God

“Sophistry is one of the methods by which politicians dress up their policies in alien clothing, to pass them off as more desirable than they really are. Spin doctors thrive best where ‘democracy’ is the slogan.”

Catherine Rowett (1956) Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (born 1956)

Source: Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2004), Ch. 7 : Spin doctors of the 5th century

Democracy , Clothes

“In everything we are destroyers – even in the instruments of destruction to which we turn for relief. The very socialism and internationalism through which our choked spirit seeks utterance, which seem to threaten your way of life, are alien to our spirit's demands and needs. Your socialists and internationalists are not serious. The charm of these movements, the attraction, such as it is, which they exercise, is only in their struggle: it is the fight which draws your gentile radicals.”

Maurice Samuel (1895–1972) novelist, translator and lecturer

You Gentiles (1924)
Source: pp. 152-153 https://archive.org/details/you-gentiles-maurice-samuel-1924-217pgs-rel.sml/page/152/mode/1up

Drawing , Way , Fight , Life

“There`s only so much bad luck that a person can have. For her to continue to wake up and con-front the alien and resolve the situation, then go back to sleep and wake up to yet another situation-to me, it`s a burden on the whole science-fiction premise of the alien.”

Sigourney Weaver (1949) American actress

“SIGOURNEY WEAVER`S CLOSE SHAVE” (May 16, 1992)

Sleep , Personality , Bad luck , Science

“Most aliens are expressionists.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)

“But the more pressing business is what feminists can do to prevent an alien culture of oppression from taking root in the West.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

Source: 2010s, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Chapter 15, “Dishonor, Death, and Feminists” (p. 231)

Business

“Illegal aliens have destroyed some of the most critical monarch butterfly habitats in the world. I bet you didn’t know that.”

Matt Gaetz (1982) American politician and member of the United States House of Representatives

"Matt Gaetz’s Claim That Migrants Are Killing Monarch Butterflies Is Utter Bullsh*t" https://www.thedailybeast.com/matt-gaetzs-claim-that-migrants-are-killing-monarch-butterflies-is-utter-bullsht, The Daily Beast, 26 July 2022

World

“If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost

Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness

A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)

Housing , Star , God , Light

Quotes about alien page 7

Quotes about alien
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