Quotes from Bernard Beckett

Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

I like the concept of teenagers and philosophy.

I write with teenagers in mind.

There is a fascination with fear. It grabs our attention.

I'm a school teacher, and later on, well past my formal education, I became very interested in science.

I didn't study science beyond high school level, but I'd been reading a lot of science books by people like Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett. I also spent a year working on a fellowship in a research centre - the Allan Wilson Centre - where I got a hands-on look at their work sequencing DNA.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

In time action becomes habit, and habit can wear reason away, leaving no traces.

Attention is a drug. There's no going back.

Without God, our reason is an accident of the cosmos, as ultimately inconsequential as the spinning of the planet or the pulling of the tides. Reason becomes unimportant, and hence untenable. Without God we have only belief, and yet we are left with nothing to believe in.

There's all these people waiting, like waiting for something is enough to make it happen. That's the future, having something to wait for. I'm glad I don't have a future then. I hate waiting.

In the end, living is defined by dying. Bookended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end.

History has taught us the futility of the conspiracy theory. Complexity gives rise to error, and in error we grow our prejudice.

I have learned to value the things others are reluctant to give.

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

The death of a child, the most sorrowful of all the mysteries.

Ideas mutate, and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.