9 Quotes by Bryan Appleyard

An adolescent act of defiance has now become a familiar form of virtue. 'Going with the flow' has become an imperative, a clear version of the good life. Chance is sentimentally evoked in popular fictions. We 'change' to move on from tragedy or difficulty, we 'change' to overcome trauma, we are frequently told to accept 'change' as some perennial fact of life, the contemplation of which brings wisdom. 235-236

The whole point I am making is that a hard, irreducible sense of our own self-awareness has been progressively denied us by the inroads of science both as a form and as a creator of our society. 231-232

Nobody, 20 years ago, forecast the Internet.

Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

Science has taken away our religion.

Of course, the other thing about evolution is that anything can be said because very little can be disproved. Experimental evidence is minimal.

Capitalism is a forest fire that is never extinguished, only contained.

The cyborg is now the ideal to which all our most advanced technology is tending.

On the maps provided by science, we find everything except ourselves.