John Wyndham Quotes

In the country you can at least grow things. You do have a chance. But a city is a sort of desert of bricks and stones. Once you've used up what is there, you're done for.

"We ourselves have a tradition of taking beatings, and then winning wars," said Bocker.

Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?

Life in all its forms is strife; the better matched the opponents, the harder the struggle. The most powerful of all weapons is intelligence; any intelligent form dominates by, and therefore survives by, its intelligence.

Wondering why one's friends chose to marry the people they did is unprofitable, but recurrent.

We've got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.

You can't drive a flock of sheep to market in a dead straight line, but there are ways of getting 'em there.

You know perfectly well that women can and do - or rather did - handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they're too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to.

There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.

She rummaged in a battered bag beside her, brought out a dirty spoon, and began to taste the beans as if they were one of the jams of paradise.

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

Safe passage along the catwalk of one's own racial code must be achieved through long experience; it is harder still to climb from it to another, and when that other is as involved as a maze and is entirely supported by incomprehensible misconceptions, a foot is bound to slip through the fabric from time to time.

How many men, do you suppose, realise the limitations of using words to convey our meanings? They may find that there are inconvenient misunderstandings, and blame language, but how many admit that the words are just a substitute for the thing they really lack—mental communication? Precious few. My point is that they do not realise the lack of direct mental communication, because they've never had it. They look on spoken or written language as a natural method of expression, whereas it is really a mechanical process [...]

Bored! My God, to think that I could ever have been bored up there.

It's better to have a pistol you don't want, than to want a pistol you've not got.