20 quotes
All people are the same, pretty well irrespective of color, creed, or the way they happen to grunt out their language.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
However, there is one respect in which the human species has shown not the slightest originality—its excessive reproductive vigor.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
There may be hagglers who will dispute this statement, but if so I propose to disregard them.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
My education was still full of holes, which I made a resolve to fill. I am still trying to carry it out.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
Quite recently I was asked to write an article to be entitled, “How to Become a Good Scientist.” In communicating my refusal to the periodical in question I was tempted to end the argument in one sentence, “By not writing articles such as this,” and then demanding my fee.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
One could conceive of other abstract systems, the consequences of which could be calculated, without it being necessary to provide a realization in actual material terms. We can conceive of other universes without those universes being compelled to exist. This indeed is the business of the pure mathematician.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
But only gradually have I learned that such ultimate successes are not what the present-day authorities in Britain really want. What really delights them is extreme tidiness combined with a façade of everyday competence. This of course is why Britain plunges further and further downhill with every passing year. The truth is the opposite: it is the ultimate success that really counts.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)
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.
Encounter with the Future (1965)