74 Quotes by Alfred Bester

We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response . . . mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves.

You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of the Holy Darwin. Most scientific.

The whole point of extravagance is to act like a fool and feel like a fool, but enjoy it.

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it.

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

Intellect is the ability to avoid belaboring the obvious.

Damn you!" Dagenham raged, "Don't you realize that you can't trust people? They don't know enough for their own good." "Then let them learn or die. We're all in this together. Let's live or die together.

That's me," he said, motioning to the robot. "That's all of us. We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response...mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves.

The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal.