Quotes from Alfred Bester

Don't ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.

We always do what's natural, only sometimes we shouldn't do it.

You're all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory.

We don't punish criminals in our enlightened age, we cure 'em; and the cure is worse than punishment.

Listen," he cried in exaltation. "Listen, normals! You must learn what it is. You must learn how it is. You must tear the barriers down. You must tear the veils away. We see the truth you cannot see … That there is nothing in man but love and faith, courage and kindness, generosity and sacrifice. All else is only the barrier of your blindness. One day we'll all be mind to mind and heart to heart …

You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.

Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory.

It was not exasperation.... It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.

They were blind to a cold fact of evolution…that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks.

One of the things that everybody knows about space travel but never mentions is its aphrodisiac quality.

Listen, normals! You must learn what it is. You must learn how it is. You must tear the barriers down. You must tear the veils away. We see the truth you cannot see... That there is nothing in man but love and faith, courage and kindness, generosity and sacrifice. All else is only the barrier of your blindness. One day we'll all be mind to mind and heart to heart...

But in order to be an iconoclast, an author must be more than merely aware of the idol he wishes to destroy. He must be intimate with it and understand it in all its aspects. This means that he must have devoted serious thought to it, and have beliefs of his own which will stand up in the place of the broken idol. In other words, any child can complain, but it takes an adult to clash with accepted beliefs . . . an adult with ideas.

He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love.

The acid of fury ran through him, eating away the brute patience and sluggishness that had made a cipher of Gully Foyle, precipitating a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine of Gully Foyle. He was dedicated.

I'm treating you like a relative. I don't pay enough for the privilege.

Be grateful you're not a peeper, sir. Be grateful that you only see the outward man. Be grateful that you never see the passions, the hatreds, the jealousies, the malice, the sicknesses … Be grateful you rarely see the frightening truth in people.

Now don't warp your orbit, Mac.

He had reached a dead end. He had been content to drift from moment to moment of existence for thirty years like some heavily armored creature, sluggish and indifferent.

Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory.

Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you.

Every man nurses the secret belief that were he God he could do the job much better.

She walks. She talks. She adapts. She has been conditioned to respond to the highest bidder.

This is Armageddon…Flowering Monstrosity. Tell me what you see." "There's

Yes, no matter how we defend ourselves against the outside we're always licked by something from the inside. There's no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves.