Mark Clifton

"The suppressed hunger to think was like an epidemic."

"Logical rationality is neither subversive nor nonsubversive. It is simply a statement of fact."

"To say that man has already achieved the ultimate and absolute truth is like a tribal taboo which says that a given river may never be crossed because the witch doctor proves beyond all reason that there is only chaos beyond. The most puzzling of all contradictory concepts given me is the human will to set up such arbitrary limits to his comprehension."

"A human being is seldom bothered with insufficient data; often the less he has the more willing he is to give a firm opinion; and man prefers some answer, even a wrong one, to the requirement that he dig deeper and find out the facts."

"The public wants miracles. The public demands miracles; and if one source ceases to provide them, they will turn to another source which seems to accomplish the spectacular. Even while they resented and opposed the scientific attitude, they lapped up the miracles which this attitude accomplished with glee."

"In either event he could only adhere to the letter of the law, but then for every yea in the law there was a nay, and it always boiled down to simple expediency. Like a psychiatric diagnosis, it could always be juggled around to fit anything you chose."

"It (objection to a machine that could think) was the hook used by the rabble rousers, whose monopoly of moral interpretation might be challenged."

"He was not psychotic enough to set himself up as a chosen arbiter of mores and laws."

"That kind of therapy, the use of force to make a man give up his convictions, has been tried since the dawn of history. I think we should have learned by now that it won’t work."

"Instant acceptance of an idea is as self-defeating as instant rejection."

"It’s pretty human to smash the guy or the thing which tries to tell us something we don’t want to hear."

"Somehow I got the impression that instead of looking into a crystal ball, they would be more inclined to look out of one."