On Matrices (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom." (Benjamin N Cardozo, Palko v. Connecticut, 1937) 

"Human experience in its immediacy, in its factual character, is like the liquid matrix before the crystal grows - unorganized, irregular, and largely bare of meaning. (Henry Margenau, "Open Vistas Philosophical Perspectives of Modern Science", 1961) 

"It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place... (Clifford D. Simak, "Time is the Simplest Thing", 1961)

"Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media, 1964)

"Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone." (Stanisław Lem, "The Cyberiad", 1965)

"Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result." (John K Galbraith, "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went", 1975)

"We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically. On the other hand, if we know that we are part of an open universe, and that our minds are a matrix of reality, we will live more creatively and powerfully." (Marilyn Ferguson, "The Aquarian Conspiracy", 1980)

"Thought is a matrix which engenders its own reality. The ideas, concepts, belief-systems that your ancestors trapped have become your trap." (Alfred A Attanasio, "Radix", 1981)

"Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination." (Judith Butler, "The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection", 1997)

On Stories (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories." (Jean de La Bruyère, "Les Caractères" Aphorism 52, 1688)

"If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?" (Thomas Hardy, "Under the Greenwood Tree", 1872)

"All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion." (Ernest Hemingway, "Death in the Afternoon", 1932)

"As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "Nausea", 1938)

"A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving." (John R R Tolkien, [Letter to his son Christopher] 1945)

"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts." Brian Aldiss, Penguin Science Fiction, 1961)

"Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat." (Orson Welles, "Chimes at Midnight", 1965)

"Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", 1971)

"Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us." (Stephen King, "Salem's Lot", 1975)

"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all." (Isaac Asimov, "My Own View" [in "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"], 1978)

"No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old." (Salman Rushdie, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", 1990)

"Nothing comes from nothing, [...] no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new."  (Salman Rushdie, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", 1990)

"People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around." (Terry Pratchett, "Witches Abroad", 1991)

"To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time." (Umberto Eco, "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods", 1994)

"Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you." (Neil Gaiman, "Gods & Tulips", 1999)

"There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries." (Umberto Eco, "Baudolino", 2000)

"Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up." (Stephen King, "Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales", 2002)

"No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river." (Mitch Albom,"The Five People You Meet in Heaven", 2003)

"Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments." (Joyce Carol Oates, "The Faith of a Writer", 2003)

"I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe." (Stephen King, "The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah", 2004)

"Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Gifts", 2004)

"Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story." (Neil Gaiman, "Anansi Boys", 2005)

"People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense." (Terry Pratchett, "Wintersmith", 2006)

"True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction - don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end." (Jeanette Winterson, "The Stone Gods", 2007)

"Arithmetic is the death of story." (Jincy Willett, "The Writing Class", 2008)

"Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school." (Ray Bradbury, The Paris Review, [interview] 2010)

"Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself." (Erin Morgenstern, "The Night Circus", 2011)

"Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth." (Rumi)

"[...] out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time." (Francis Bacon) 

"Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them." (Clive S Lewis)

Richard Bach - Collected Quotes

"In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime."  (Richard Bach, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", 1977)

"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers." (Richard Bach, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", 1977)

"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts." (Richard Bach, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", 1977)

"You teach best what you most need to learn." (Richard Bach, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", 1977)

"The only things that matter are those made of truth and joy, and not of tin and glass." (Richard Bach, :There’s No Such Place as Far Away", 1979)

"There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach the places we’ve chosen to go." (Richard Bach, "The Bridge across Forever", 1984)

"An easy life doesn’t teach us anything. In the end it’s the learning that matters: what we’ve learned and how we’ve grown." (Richard Bach, "One", 1988)

"In every language, from Arabic to Zulu to calligraphy to shorthand to math to music to art to wrought stone, everything from the Unified Field Theory to a curse to a sixpenny nail to an orbiting satellite, anything expressed is a net around some idea." (Richard Bach, "One", 1988)

"No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it." (Richard Bach, "One", 1988)

"No one can solve problems for someone whose problem is that they don’t want problems solved." (Richard Bach, "One", 1988)

"The exciting thing about ideas is putting them to work. The moment we try them on our own, launch them away from shore, they switch from what-if to become daring plunges down white rivers, as dangerous and as exhilarating." (Richard Bach, "One", 1988)

"The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice." (Richard Bach, "One", 1988)

"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift. We seek problems because we need their gifts." (Richard Bach)

Douglas Adams - Collected Quotes

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode] 1978)

"The chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied."  (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode] 1978)

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode]1978)

"You begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode]1978)

"The main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy", 1979)

"The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent." (Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)

"One of the interesting things about space [...] is how dull it is." (Douglas Adams, "Life, the Universe, and Everything", 1982)

"Their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do." (Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish", 1985)

"The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis." (Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", 1987)

"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks." (Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", 1988)

"Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through." (Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", 1988)

"Assumptions are the things you don’t know you’re making." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"It does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." (Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." (Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)

Stanislaw Lem - Collected Quotes

"Insanity, gentlemen, is not a catchall for every human action that involves motives we don’t understand. Insanity has its own structure, its own internal logic." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)

"So-called common sense relies on programmed nonperception, concealment, or ridicule of everything that doesn’t fit into the conventional nineteenth century vision of a world that can be explained down to the last detail." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)

"What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle - what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. [...] Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetually collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out of things, to make everything respond in one unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory. But it’s only soup..." (Stanislaw Lem, "The Investigation", 1959)

"Are we not, in the end, a clamorous prelude to the final silence, a marriage bed to engender dust, a universe for microbes, microbes that strive to circumnavigate us? We are as unfathomable, as inscrutable as That which brought us into being, and we choke on our own enigma..." (Stanislaw Lem, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", 1961

"How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?" (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)

"Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him." (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)

"The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow." (Stanislaw Lem, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", 1961)

"We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of cosmos. [...] We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors."  (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)

"Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men." (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)

"Once there lived a certain engineer-cosmogonist who lit stars to dispel the dark." (Stanislaw Lem, ‘"Uranium Earpieces", 1965),

"Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it." (Stanislaw Lem, "King Globares and the Sages", 1965)

"These dwarfs amass knowledge as others do treasure; for this reason they are called Hoarders of the Absolute. Their wisdom lies in the fact that they collect knowledge but never use it." (Stanislaw Lem, "How Erg the Self-Inducing Slew a Paleface", 1965)

"For years astrophysicists have been racking their brains over the reason for the great difference in the amounts of cosmic dust in various galaxies. The answer, I think, is quite simple: the higher a civilization is, the more dust and refuse it produces. This is a problem more for janitors than for astrophysicists." (Stanislaw Lem, ‘"Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy, Space Traveller", 1966)

"By squandering nuclear energy, polluting asteroids and planets, ravaging the Preserve, and leaving litter everywhere we go, we shall ruin outer space and turn it into one big dump. It is high time we came to our senses and enforced the laws. Convinced that every minute of delay is dangerous, I sound the alarm: Let us save the Universe." (Stanislaw Lem, ‘"Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy, Space Traveller", 1966)

"Every intelligent creature was curious - and curiosity prompted it to act when something incomprehensible took place."(Stanislaw Lem, "The Hunt", 1968)

"Is there anything more contemptible than Nature? The scientists, the philosophers have always tried to understand Nature, while the thing to do is to destroy it!" (Stanislaw Lem, "The Sanitorium of Dr. Vliperdius", 1971)

On Culture (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being." (Thomas Carlyle, "Jean Paul Friedrich Richter" (1827)

"This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer." (Lev N Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)

"Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection." (Matthew Arnold, "Culture and Anarchy", 1869)

"Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming is the character of perfection as culture conceives it." (Matthew Arnold, "Culture and Anarchy", 1869)

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language." (Anton Chekhov, [letter to A.S. Suvorin] 1892)

"As the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own." (Margaret Mead, "Coming of Age in Samoa", 1928)

"The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within [...] They come from a peculiar type of brainy people, always found in our country, who if they add something to our culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals." (Winston Churchill, [speech] 1933)

"There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more [...] more plus infinity. (Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1953)

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." (Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451", 1953)

"No one person can change a whole culture." (Poul Anderson, "Ghetto", 1954)

"When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate." (Damon Knight, "Stranger Station", 1956)

"The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"Homo can truly be called sapiens when he practices his specialty of being unspecialized. His repeated attempts to freeze himself into an all-answering pattern or culture or ideology, or whatever he has named it, have repeatedly brought ruin. Give him the pragmatic business of making his living, and he will usually do rather well. He adapts, within broad limits." (Poul Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness", 1971)

"No culture as yet has actually forgotten history because no culture has really possessed more than fragments of it." (Edgar Pangborn, "Mount Charity", 1971)

"When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome." (Joanna Russ, ‘"When It Changed", 1972)

"Man creates culture and through culture creates himself." (Pope John Paul II, "Osservatore Romano", 1980)

"A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot." (Robert A. Heinlein, "Friday", 1982)

"Love was always a word that covered too much territory, from loving a spouse to loving a hobby or abstract justice, and the emotion-mongers of popular entertainment portrayed it as everlasting and exclusive. In a culture under stress the truth could not be concealed by sentimental fluff. The Greenhouse people learned to appreciate love without glorifying it." (George Turner, "Drowning Towers", 1987)

"Some cultures send their young people to the desert to seek visions and guidance, searching for true thinking spawned by the openness of the place, the loneliness, the beauty of emptiness." (Pat Murphy, "Rachel in Love", 1987)

"Most people don’t listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they’re going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value." (Terry Pratchett, "Pyramids", 1989)

"As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without culture, so the mind without cultivation can never produce good fruit." (Seneca)

"Culture is acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit." (Matthew Arnold)

"Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs." (Thomas Wolfe)

"Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart." (Mohandas Gandhi)

"In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way. Veracity first of all, and forever." (Ralph W Emerson)

"It surprises me how our culture can destroy curiosity in the most curious of all animals - human beings." (Paul Maclean)

"Language is the road of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going." (Rita Mae Brown)

"No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive." (Mohandas Gandhi)

"Noble life demands a noble architecture of noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall." (Frank Lloyd Wright)

On Logarithms - From Fiction to Science-Fiction

"Consequently, these laws of nature need only be discovered, and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy. Needless to say, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or, better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the present-day encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world." (Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from Underground", 1864)

"Every fact is a logarithm; one added term ramifies it until it is thoroughly transformed. In the general aspect of things, the great lines of creation take shape and arrange themselves into groups; beneath lies the unfathomable." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"What logarithms are to mathematics that mathematics are to the other sciences." (Friederich von Hardenberg [Novalis], "Schriften", 1901)

"Those terrible logarithms, when I happened to open a table of them, made my head swim, with their columns of figures; actual fright, not unmixed with respect, overwhelmed me on the very threshold of that arithmetical cave." (Jean-Henri Fabre, "The Life of the Fly", 1913)

"She thinks of the Heat Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of those late summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled manuscripts forever, tail in mouth, the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence." (Pamela Zoline, "The Heat Death of the Universe", 1967)

"You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit." (Molly Ivins, The Progressive, 1988)

On Experience (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Vivian Grey", 1826)

"Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea." (John S Mill, "Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism", 1874)

"Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." (Henry James, "The Art of Fiction", 1884)

"Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes." (Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", 1891)

 "All experience is an arch, to build upon." (Henry B Adams, "The Education of Henry Adams", 1907)

"Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by experience." (Elbert Hubbard, "A Thousand & One Epigrams, 1911)

"A course of instruction will be the more successful the more its individual phases assume the character of experience." (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Buch der Freunde" ["Book of Friends"], 1922) 

"The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them." (Walter Lippmann, "Public Opinion", 1922)

"Human language is naturally wanting in words that are adequate for the delineation of events and sensations beyond the normal scope of human experience." (Clark A Smith, "The City of the Singing Flame", 1931)

"We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable." (Herbert G Wells, "Mind at the End of Its Tether", 1946)

"A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences." (James O Bailey, "Pilgrims through Space and Time", 1947)

"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Dialogues", 1954)

"It’s the highest goal of man - the need to grow and advance [...] to find new things [...] to expand. To spread out, reach areas, experiences, comprehend and live in an evolving fashion. To push aside routine and repetition, to break out of mindless monotony and thrust forward. To keep moving on [...]" (Philip K Dick, "Solar Lottery", 1955)

"Life is just a process of picking up scars and experience." (Michael Swanwick, "Ginungagap", 1980)

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public." (Samuel Johnson)

On Impossibility (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"[Sherlock Holmes:] How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" (Sir Arthur C Doyle, "Sign of the Four", 1890)

"Except under controlled conditions, or in circumstances where it is possible to ignore individuals and consider only large numbers and the law of averages, any kind of accurate foresight is impossible." (Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop", 1944)

"Can any of us fix anything? No. None of us can do that. We're specialized. Each one of us has his own line, his own work. I understand my work, you understand yours. The tendency in evolution is toward greater and greater specialization. Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it. Continued complexity makes it impossible for us to know anything outside our own personal field — I can't follow the work of the man sitting at the next desk over from me. Too much knowledge has piled up in each field. And there are too many fields." (Philip K. Dick, The Variable Man", 1952)

"It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable." (Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, "The Fugitive", 1962)

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from." (Douglas N Adams, "The Original Hitchhiker Radio Script, Fit the Fifth", 1978)

"Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible." (Rod Sterling)

Iain Banks - Collected Quotes

"All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them." (Iain Banks, "The Wasp Factory", 1984)

"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules." (Iain Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck." (Iain Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?" (Iain Banks, "Use of Weapons", 1990)

 "Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion." (Iain Banks, "The Algebraist", 2004)

"You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history." (Iain Banks, "The Steep Approach to Garbadale", 2007)

"All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy." (Iain Banks, "Surface Detail", 2010)

"One should never mistake pattern for meaning." (Iain Banks, "The Hydrogen Sonata",  2012)

On Hypotheses (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"An hypothesis is only a habit - a habit of looking through a glass of one peculiar colour, which imparts its hue to all around it." (Frederick Marryat, "The King's Own", 1873) 

"If the fresh facts which come to our knowledge all fit themselves into the scheme, then our hypothesis may gradually become a solution." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge", 1908)

"More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason." (Georges Bernanos, "L'imposture" ["The Impostor"], 1927)

"Science fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin." (Kingsley Amis, "New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction", 1960) 

"To the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems - that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc. formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about - are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving." (Philip K Dick, "The Android and the Human", [speech] 1972) 

"It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth." (Milan Kundera, "Encounter", 2009)

On Beliefs: From Fiction to Science-Fiction

"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking." (Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1865-1869)

"The world is devoted to physical science, because it believes theses discoveries will increase its capacity of luxury and self-indulgence. But the pursuit of science only leads to the insoluble." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Lothair", 1870)

"The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them." (Marcel Proust, "In Search of Lost Time", 1913)

"So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe." (Isaac Asimov, "Nightfall", 1941)

"A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Flight to Arras", 1942)

"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." (George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose", Tribune, 1946)

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." (George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four", 1949)

"There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death." (Isaac Asimov, "The Stars in Their Courses", 1971)

"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away." (Philip K Dick, "Valis", 1981)

"Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change." (Frank Herbert, "God Emperor of Dune", 1984)

"Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty?" (Isaac Asimov, "Foundation and Earth", 1986)

"The dreams of people are in the machines, a planet network of active imaginations hooked into their made-up, make-believe worlds. Artificial reality is taking over; it has its own children." (Storm Constantine, "Immaculate" (1991)

"Chaos is impatient. It's random. And above all it's selfish. It tears down everything just for the sake of change, feeding on itself in constant hunger. But Chaos can also be appealing. It tempts you to believe that nothing matters except what you want." (Rick Riordan, "The Throne of Fire", 2011)

Ursula K Le Guin - Collected Quotes

"But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. […] It is dangerous, that power. [...] It must follow knowledge, and serve need." (Ursula K Le Guin, "A Wizard of Earthsea", 1968)

"Isn’t the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?" (Ursula K Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", 1971)

"When things don't change any longer, that's the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is - and the more life." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Lathe of Heaven", 1971)

"Time is no longer a line along which history, past or future, lies neatly arranged, but a field of great mystery and complexity, in the contemplation of which the mind perceives an immense terror, and an indestructible hope." (Ursula K Le Guin, 1977)

"Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed", 1974)

"It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Language of the Night", 1979)

"If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic." (Ursula K. Le Guin, "Dancing at the Edge of the World", 1989)

"Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Dancing at the Edge of the World", 1989)

"All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. [...] No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot get back to seeing the part as the whole." (Ursula K Le Guin, "A Man of the People", 1995)

On Intelligence (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before - a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun." (Henry D Thoreau, "Walking", 1851)

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)

"For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live." (George B Shaw, "Back to Methuselah", 1921)

"There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence - or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Lost Worlds of 2001", 1972)

"The universe is full of matter and force. Yet in all that force, amongst all the bulks and gravities, the rains of cosmic light, the bombardment of energy - how little spirit, how small the decimal points of intelligence." (Ray Bradbury et al, "Mars and the Mind of Man", 1973)

"If arithmetical skill is the measure of intelligence, then computers have been more intelligent than all human beings all along. If the ability to play chess is the measure, then there are computers now in existence that are more intelligent than any but a very few human beings. However, if insight, intuition, creativity, the ability to view a problem as a whole and guess the answer by the 'feel' of the situation, is a measure of intelligence, computers are very unintelligent indeed. Nor can we see right now how this deficiency in computers can be easily remedied, since human beings cannot program a computer to be intuitive or creative for the very good reason that we do not know what we ourselves do when we exercise these qualities." (Isaac Asimov, "Machines That Think", 1983)

"One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them [...] these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension - between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see - is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain - or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create? - are the ones found in the world around us." (John Barnes, "Mother of Storms", 1994)

"Artificial intelligence is a concept that obscures accountability. Our problem is not machines acting like humans - it's humans acting like machines." (John Twelve Hawks, "Spark", 2014)

Douglas N Adams - Collected Quotes

"It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from." (Douglas N Adams, "The Original Hitchhiker Radio Script, Fit the Fifth" , 1978)

"The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination." (Douglas N Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", 1979)

"The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore." (Douglas N Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)

"The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent." (Douglas N Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980) 

"Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm." (Douglas N Adams, "Life, the Universe and Everything", 1982)

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis." (Douglas N Adams, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", 1987) 

"Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through." (Douglas N Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", 1988)

"The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don’t even know you’re making." Douglas N Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there." (Douglas N Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about." (Douglas N Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)

"Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order though." (Douglas N Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)

"Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you." (Douglas N Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)

"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." (Douglas N Adams, "The Salmon of Doubt", 2002)

"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works." (Douglas N Adams, "The Salmon of Doubt", 2002)

"Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason." (Douglas N Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts" Vol. 2, 2012)

"The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful." (Douglas N Adams)

Out of Context: On Science Fiction (Definitions)

"Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future." (Clifton Fadiman, 1951)

"[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility." (Kingsley Amis, "New Maps of Hell", 1960)

"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts." (Brian W Aldiss (Ed.), "Penguin Science Fiction", 1961)

"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable." (Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, "The Fugitive", 1962)

"Science fiction is, very strictly and literally, analogous to science facts. It is a convenient analog system for thinking about new scientific, social, and economic ideas - and for re-examining old ideas." (John W Campbell Jr., "Prologue to Analog", 1962)

"Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness", 1969)

"Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation." (Alvin Toffler, "Future Shock", 1970)

"Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger." (James Gunn, "Road to Science Fiction" Vol. 2, 1979)

"If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Dancing at the Edge of the World", 1989)

"Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be." (Orson S Card, "How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy", 1990)

"Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own, in order to investigate by way of pleasurable thought-experiments how things might be done differently." (Brian Stableford, "Space, Time, and Infinity: Essays on Fantastic Literature", 2006)

"Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction." (Ray Bradbury)

"Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible." (Rod Serling) 

"General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else." (Marvin Minsky)

"[...] science fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could." (Arthur C Clarke)

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. [...] Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about." (Ray Bradbury)

"Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know." (Ted Chiang)

"Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation." (Michael Dirda)

"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever." (Theodore Sturgeon)

Complexity (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute." (Walter Lippmann, "The Public Philosophy", 1955)

"The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow." (Stanislaw Lem, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", 1961)

"[Human] communication is rendered more complex by the use of differing sets of sound-symbols, called languages and by the fact that a given set of symbols tends to change with the passage of years to become an entirely new language." (Howard L Myers, "The Creatures of Man", 1968)

"Isn’t the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?" (Ursula K Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", 1971)

"Time is no longer a line along which history, past or future, lies neatly arranged, but a field of great mystery and complexity, in the contemplation of which the mind perceives an immense terror, and an indestructible hope." (Ursula K Le Guin, 1977)

"Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses - viruses generated from within itself." (Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash", 1992)

"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." (Marc S Zicree, "Survivors" [episode of Babylon 5], 1994)

On Coincidence IV (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one." (Henry D Thoreau, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849)

"There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen." (Gilbert K Chesterton, "The Father Brown omnibus", 1951)

"In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted." (Rex Stout, "Champagne for One", 1958)

"There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence." (Alan Moore, "V for Vendetta", 1982)

"Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys." (Emma Bull, "Bone Dance: A Fantasy for Technophiles", 1991)

"Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause." (Orson Scott Card, "The Call Of Earth", 1992)

"If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word 'coincidence' exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists." (Chuck Klosterman, "Eating the Dinosaur", 2009)

"When there are strange things going on all around, every coincidence should be considered very carefully." (Sergei Lukyanenko, "The New Watch", 2013)

Science (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth", 1864)

"A mind truly opened to what science has to teach must see that it is a little thing. [...] Pain is simply our intrinsic medical adviser to warn us and stimulate us." (Herbert G Wells, "The Island of Doctor Moreau", 1896)

"Science of to-day - the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow - superstition of to-day." (Charles Fort, "The Book of the Damned", 1919)

"The superstitions of today are the scientific facts of tomorrow." (Hamilton Deane & John L. Balderston, "Dracula", 1927)

"There are no enemies in science, professor, only phenomena to study." (Charles Lederer, "The Thing (from Another World)", 1951)

"Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it." (Stanislaw Lem, "King Globares and the Sages", 1965)

"Science offers a sounder basis on which to formulate systems of thought and ethics." (Michael Moorcock, "Behold the Man", 1967)

"Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it." (Gene Wolfe, "Seven American Nights" (1978)

"science: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time." (Terry Pratchett, "Wings", 1990)

Reality (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"The horror of the Same Old Thing is [...] an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them." (C. S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", 1942)

"It is the normal lot of people who must live this life [in space] to be - by terrestrial standards—insane. Insanity under such conditions is a useful and logical defense mechanism, an invaluable and salutary retreat from reality." (Charles L Harness, "The Paradox Men", 1949)

"It seemed as if the structure of reality trembled for an instant, and that behind the world of the senses he caught a glimpse of another and totally different universe [...]" (Arthur C Clarke, "The City and the Stars", 1956)

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." (Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House", 1959)

"Reality? It is only the illusion we can agree upon." (James Gunn, "The Joy Makers", 1961)

"When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating." (Gene Roddenberry, "Star Trek" ["The Menagerie"], 1966)

"The whole of modern so-called existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists."John Brunner, "Stand on Zanzibar", 1968)

"Reality, to me, is not so much something that you perceive, but something you make." (Philip K Dick, "The Android and the Human", 1972)

"The theory changes the reality it describes." (Philip K Dick, "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said", 1974)

"We exist in time. Time is what binds molecules to make your brown eyes, your yellow hair, your thick fingers. Time changes the structures, alters hair or fingers, dims the eyes, immutably mutating reality. Time, itself unchanging, is the cosmic glue, the universal antisolvent that holds our worlds together." (Marta Randall, "Secret Rider", 1976)

"There was no substitute for reality; one should beware of imitations." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Fountains of Paradise", 1979)

"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away." (Philip K Dick, "Valis", 1981)

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." (Philip K Dick, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later", 1985)

"It is now known to science that there are many more dimensions than the classical four. Scientists say that these don’t normally impinge on the world because the extra dimensions are very small and curve in on themselves, and that since reality is fractal most of it is tucked inside itself. This means either that the universe is more full of wonders than we can hope to understand or, more probably, that scientists make things up as they go along." (Terry Pratchett, Pyramids, 1989)

"It is always hard when reality intrudes on belief." (Alan D Foster, "Cyber Way", 1990)

"The dreams of people are in the machines, a planet network of active imaginations hooked into their made-up, make-believe worlds. Artificial reality is taking over; it has its own children." (Storm Constantine, "Immaculate", 1991)