Quotes from John Wyndham

We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that.

I'm not romancing. I'm talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through the ruins, for food. We're letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan't be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. "That's their worry," we say. "Damn our children's children; we're all right.

But it is an inescapable conclusion that life has to be dynamic and not static. Change is bound to come one way or another.

a sort of botanical glory-hole

And your oil engines are just a deplorable perversion – dirty, noisy, poisonous, and the cars you drive with them are barbarous, dangerous..." Chocky in "Chocky

They haven't God's word like they thought: God doesn't have any last word. If He did He'd be dead. But He isn't dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that's alive

I'm quite sure there is a simple way. The trouble is that simple ways so often come out of such complicated research.

I was hiding from them even while I moved among them.

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here"—that one's own little time and place is beyond cataclysms. And now it was happening here.

The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution: and we are part of it. The static, the enemy of change, is the enemy of life, and therefore our implacable enemy.

You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way." -The Wheel, John Wtndham

My great-aunt, and other people's great-aunts, won all the rights that women need ages ago. All that's been lacking since then is the social courage to use them. My great-aunt and the rest thought that by technically defeating male privilege they'd scored a great victory. What they didn't realize is that the greatest enemies of women aren't men at all, they are women: silly women, lazy women, and smug women.

Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can't even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race. No,' he shook his head, 'no, I'm afraid Bocker's idea of fraternization never had the chance of a flea in a furnace.

The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept, so do the timid, so do the mentally lazy – and so do all of us, more than we imagine.

You are judging by social rules and finding crime. I am considering an elemental struggle, and finding no crime - just grim, primeval danger

Reality is relative. Devils, evil spirits, witches and so on became real enough to the people who believed in them. Just as God is to people who believe in Him. When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant.

In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.

It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's a still poorer pass to have no one to depend on.

When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange, because it began before I even knew what a city was.

Odd, don't you think? We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us – but these creatures we shall carefully rear.

sham idealists: the quite large number of people who profess ideals as a form of premium for other-life insurance, and are content to lay up slavery and destitution for their descendants so long as they are enabled to produce personal copybooks of elevated views at the gate of heaven.

And so the one in our garden continued its growth peacefully, as did thousands like it in neglected spots all over the world. It was some little time later that the first one picked up its roots and walked.

In Oppley they're smart, and in Stouch they're smarmy, but Midwich folk are just plain barmy

They stamp on any change: they close the way and keep the type fixed because they've got the arrogance to think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they. and only they, are in the true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to decree, "thus far, and no farther." That is their great sin: they try to strangle the life out of Life.