Brian Aldiss Quotes

What would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?

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.

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.

The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.

What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?

Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down.

They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

This was long before internal parasites had labyrinth their way into the mechanisms of eternity.

Amid all the triumphs of our civilization — yes, and amid the crushing problems of overpopulation too — it is sad to reflect how many millions of people suffer from increasing loneliness and isolation. Our serving-man will be a boon to them; he will always answer, and the most vapid conversation cannot bore him. For the future, we plan more models, male and female — some of them without the limitations of this first one, I promise you! — of more advanced design, true bio-electronic beings. Not only will they possess their own computer, capable of individual programming; they will be linked to the World Data Network. Thus everyone will be able to enjoy the equivalent of an Einstein in their own homes. Personal isolation will then be banished forever!

He began talking to an imagined woman, achieving an eloquence that was never his when he was face to face with anyone else.

Each wave was the only wave.

The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the world — in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind — can bring about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization of evil.

Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta.

Digging deep in a Martian desert men discovered an enormous brain. It suddenly started to think at them — So they covered it up again...

-Expansion to your ego, friend.
-At your expense.