John Wyndham Quotes

To sleep in peace, and resume a nightmare when one wakes, is a highly undesirable reversal of the natural order.

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does. . . .

Sooner or later the amateur always overreaches himself.

Cruelty is as old as life itself.

Ingenious you certainly were - like monkeys. But you neglected your philosophers - to your own ruin. Each new discovery was a toy. You never considered its true worth. You just pushed it into your system - a system already suffering from hardening of the arteries. And you were a greedy people. You took each discovery as if it were a bright new garment, but when you put it on you wore it over your old, verminous rags. You had grave need of disinfectants.

Primitive man would see every one of us as a magician.

It boils down to this. If a man, any man, claims to have had an experience which is outside all normal experience, it will be inferred, will it not, that he is in some way not quite a normal man? A small cloud, a mere wrack, of doubt and risk begins to gather above him. It is tenuous, too insubstantial for him to disperse, yet it casts a faint, persistent shadow. There is, I imagine, no such thing as a normal human being, but there is a widespread feeling that there ought to be. Any organisation has a conception of 'the type of man we want here' which is regarded as the normal for its purposes. So every man there attempts more or less to accord to it - organisational man, in fact - and anyone who diverges more than slightly from the type in either his public, or in his private life does so to the peril of his career.

The Americans had got into the habit of regarding the moon as a piece of U.S.-bespoken real estate that they would get around to developing when they were ready.

There are some forms of knowledge which it is unwise to spread; men are not yet ready to handle them.

Co-operation makes many things possible. Co-operation introduces a factor which is greater than the sum of its parts. [...] Such a tremendous thing - the ability to co-operate... It makes you wonder what we could do if we were really to co-operate.

There is a sense of reason's fingernails scrabbling to keep their hold, as one slides towards something which is not accountable; not, by ordinary standards, quite sane...

The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise.

Dying," observed the doctor, "is such a very ordinary thing to do.

Pretty girls are lovely as the flowers in May, but there are so many flowers in May.

Many men on earth have the vanity to believe in another life.