Novelists From England

"Assuming children and students do not wish to learn anything, then I suppose the present method of teaching is about right. It seems predicated on the notion that learning is an unpleasant medicine which must be swallowed at any price. But where a child is keen to learn, present methods seem woefully and even shockingly inadequate."

"Of all the backgrounds it seems to me that the typical suburban community must be by far the worst. The child’s parents have already compromised with life by living in such a place. It would be far better from the child’s point of view to be raised in an actual slum. The danger is, of course, that the child quickly comes to regard comfort as the number one priority."

"My education was still full of holes, which I made a resolve to fill. I am still trying to carry it out."

"There is no room in these streamlined days for such artistry. Everything is now decided by rule and rote, but this is one of the reasons why England is no longer in the great country she used to be."

"There is no substitute for continuous endeavor. Of course all older men have good intentions, they have every wish “to keep up.” But the endless calls of students and committees and the ceaseless ringing of the telephone can defeat the best intentions. Only very recently I myself summoned the courage to deal with the problem. My solution is to answer only essential letters, entirely to ignore the telephone, and to restrict severely my participation in committee meetings. In modern ant-like society, with its penchant for excreting mountains of trivial literature, it needs an enormous determination to follow these simple precepts."

"His new leisure also afforded my father the opportunity of indulging another of his favorite occupations—talking. There was a great deal of talk in our house, which had two effects on me: one, that I learned not to listen when I don’t want to listen; and the other, an aversion to talking."

"I helped him willingly and most efficiently, the latter because I knew that if I did jobs cheerfully and badly I wouldn’t be asked too often."

"All people are pretty much alike, except in so far as ambition may change a man from a normal person into a machine or a monster."

"My cast of mind is a very bad handicap in this age of the committee. My true thoughts when I sit on a committee are so grotesquely at variance with the business in hand that they simply cannot be expressed at all. I am overwhelmed by the fatuity of most of what is being said, and there is a constant parade in my mind of the pathetic political figures of the first third of the present century."

"The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."

"The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."

"Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate … . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect … higher intelligences … even to the limit of God … such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific."

"Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."

"Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards."

"We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today."

"I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon...Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported."

"It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned."

"It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas."

""Big Bang" theory"

"We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. It now turns out that... all such theories are in conflict with observational requirements."

"I am often asked what it is like to be a scientist and how one goes about being a scientist. I find such questions uncomfortable because I know of no nicely potted answers to them. It is necessary to dig deep into one’s own experience to produce anything like a worthwhile assessment. And this is to risk the perils of autobiography, usually so fascinating to the narrator and so boring to the reader."

"Experience shows that knowledge dies very hard once it has been obtained—the acquisition of knowledge is essentially irreversible, a truth already recognized in the Garden of Eden."

"The concept here is that a highly organized society can collapse through a population overload, even though the people themselves are not starving. It is the organization that ultimately becomes overloaded and collapses."

"There may be hagglers who will dispute this statement, but if so I propose to disregard them."

"However, there is one respect in which the human species has shown not the slightest originality—its excessive reproductive vigor."

"Where, then, do we go from here? The answer to this critical question plainly depends on whether the rise of the world population becomes permanently stabilized or not. Will the warnings of the past be heeded? My suspicion is that they will not."

"All people are the same, pretty well irrespective of color, creed, or the way they happen to grunt out their language."

"So far from proceeding in this way, the really curious feature of every organization in which it has been my misfortune to be involved is that while people argue vociferously and almost completely without data about all projected changes they show a little or no interest in the effects of changes after they have been introduced."

"The attitude of the conservative is basically wrong: change should not be opposed. Not in a root and branch sense. What the conservatives should demand and insist on is that any projected changes should be reversible. The deadly changes are those which are irreversible, like the British introducing Greeks into Cyprus. Or like taking the sparrow and the rabbit to Australia. So long as a projected change can be shown to be reversible there should be no very serious objection to making a tryout. If the first step along the new road turns out well, the second step can be made, but if it turns out badly one simply retreats to where one was before. This seems to me to be the essential principle of social change."

"I have been astonished by the way in which the tug of war between left and right is conducted. What seems to happen is this: the left, the ideas-men, the liberals, propose a new idea involving change. The conservatives oppose all change on principle. An argument now develops in which I find myself unable to take any real part. I know that without new ideas, without change, even the most modest enterprise soon congeals and dies. But I also know that most new ideas, like mutations, turn out very badly. Hence from the beginning I am aware of the basic dilemma. But not so the liberals or the conservatives. The liberals, for their part, are quite convinced that the new idea is an excellent one, but when pressed for proof they merely follow the dictum of Robert Owen, “never argue, repeat your assertion.” So far as the liberals are concerned I feel as if I were in the presence of divine revelation. The conservatives on the other hand are blockers, stone wallers, Verdun-types with “they shall not pass” expression written all over their faces. On the whole, because I know that most new ideas are dubious, I end by voting with the conservatives."

"Any organization is better than no organization. Tribal customs show great variety, but they have in common the property of enabling a number of humans to act in concert with each other. It is the communal character of group action that is important, not the particular customs of any particular tribe. Group action is the essential common denominator of all tribal life. And any group acting together is far more powerful than the same number of persons acting only as individuals."

"This may seem like insanity, and so it is. It offsets the real problems of modern life. How can an apparently insane species manage to organize itself in a civilized way? I am not so sure that it can. The big mystery is why we have managed to get so far."

"Inevitably we are led to ask: why does this appalling rubbish get published—and not merely published, but displayed prominently in the very heart of an apparently respectable newspaper? In a word, because this is what people want, and if The Times didn’t fill itself pretty well from cover to cover with such stuff it would soon go out of business."

"It is easy to give a recipe for writing a successful non-fiction book—simply find grounds for optimism that no one has spotted before and expatiate thereon."

"“By and large, conventional religion, as many humans accept it, is illogical in its attempt to conceive of entities lying outside the Universe. Since the Universe comprises everything, it is evident that nothing can lie outside it. The idea of a ‘god’ creating the Universe is a mechanistic absurdity clearly derived from the making of machines by men. I take it that we are in agreement about all this.”"

"Lives loss through an ‘act of God’ are regretted, perhaps deeply regretted, but they do not arouse our wildest passions. It is otherwise with lives that are forfeited through deliberate human agency. The word ‘deliberate’ is important here. One deliberate murder can produce a sharper reaction than ten thousand deaths on the roads."

"It’s only too easy to read your own state of mind into what other people say."

"Losing power, utterly and completely, is the most dreadful prospect that a politician can think of. It overshadows everything else."

"“Now do you see my point?” “I’m beginning to see through a glass darkly. You mean that the mental make-up of a leading politician is likely to be such that he couldn’t dream it possible that anyone could find the prospect of becoming a dictator wholly unpalatable.” “Yes, I can see it all, Chris,” Leicester grinned. “Graft everywhere, executions just for the laughs, no wife or daughter safe.”"

"It isn’t the Universe that’s following our logic, it’s we that are constructed in accordance with the logic of the Universe. And that gives what I might call a definition of intelligent life: something that reflects the basic structure of the Universe."

"Viewed from a wholly logical point of view the bearing and rearing of children is a thoroughly unattractive proposition. To a woman it means pain and endless worry. To a man it means extra work extending over many years to support his family. So, if we were wholly logical about sex, we should probably not bother to reproduce at all. Nature takes care of this by making us utterly and wholly irrational."

"I will say this for you, Chris. I never knew anyone who was better at finding work for other people."

"Before anyone starts criticising, let me say that I know it’s a preposterous idea and I wouldn’t suggest it for a moment if the alternative weren’t even more outrageously preposterous."

"The policy was to keep everything in watertight compartments. In the interests of security, they said, but more likely in the interests of inefficiency."

"“Not everyone views the government with quite the same disrespect that you do.” “No, more’s the pity.”"

"“You haven’t very much respect for my profession, have you, Professor Kingsley?” “Since it is you who wish for frankness, I will tell you that I have not. I regard politicians rather as I regard the instruments on the dashboard of my car. They tell me what is going on in the engine of state, but they don’t control it.”"

"Ifs and buts are the stuff of politics, Mr. Parkinson. As a scientist I am concerned with facts not with motives, suspicions, and airy-fairy nothingness."

"“I’m still waiting to hear how I should have compromised. Are you sure that ‘compromise’ and ‘capitulate’ are not synonymous in your vocabulary?”"

"The two men were mentally too dissimilar for more than a half hour of conversation between them to be possible."

"“But I can’t go along and gatecrash.” “Nonsense, of course you can come—a guest from England! You’ll be the lion of the party. Probably half a dozen film moguls from Hollywood will want to sign you up on the spot.” “All the more reason for not going,” said Kingsley."