Top 50 Alfred Bester Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The mind is the reality. You are what you think.”

— Alfred Bester

2. “Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation Deep space is my dwelling place The stars my destination.”

— Alfred Bester

3. “The whole point of extravagance is to act like a fool and feel like a fool, but enjoy it.”

— Alfred Bester

4. “Most science fiction, quite frankly, is silly nonsense.”

— Alfred Bester

5. “Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

— Alfred Bester

6. “Faith in faith’ he answered himself. ‘It isn’t necessary to have something to believe in. It’s only necessary to believe that somewhere there’s something worthy of belief.”

— Alfred Bester

7. “He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love.”

— Alfred Bester

8. “I’m a great believer in people and their untapped potential.”

— Alfred Bester

9. “We don’t punish criminals in our enlightened age, we cure ’em; and the cure is worse than punishment.”

— Alfred Bester

10. “Eight, sir; seven, sir; Six, sir; five, sir; Four, sir; Three, sir; Two, sir; one! Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun.”

— Alfred Bester

11. “Intellect is the ability to avoid belaboring the obvious.”

— Alfred Bester

12. “Millions for nonsense, but not one cent for entropy.”

— Alfred Bester

13. “You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...”

— Alfred Bester

14. “It’s obvious we can’t all be a Gully Foyle, but most of us energize at such a low level, so far short of our real capabilities, we could all be more, do more.”

— Alfred Bester

15. “Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory.”

— Alfred Bester

16. “A man is a member of society first, and an individual second. You must go along with society, whether it chooses destruction or not.”

— Alfred Bester

17. “The man who upsets the morphology of society is a cancer. The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal.”

— Alfred Bester

18. “If a man’s got talent and guts to buck society, he’s obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you’ve got left are the sheep.”

— Alfred Bester

19. “There is no sun.”

— Alfred Bester

20. “He had reached a dead end. He had been content to drift from moment to moment of existence for thirty years like some heavily armored creature, sluggish and indifferent.”

— Alfred Bester

21. “You can’t go back and you can’t catch up. Happy endings are always bittersweet.”

— Alfred Bester

22. “Any man was capable of jaunting provided he developed two faculties, visualization and concentration. He had to visualize, completely and precisely, the spot to which he desired to teleport himself; and he had to concentrate the latent energy of his mind into a single thrust to get him there. Above all, he had to have faith.”

— Alfred Bester

23. “There was the taste of a strand of cool pearls in his mouth.”

— Alfred Bester

24. “The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal.”

— Alfred Bester

25. “It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways.”

— Alfred Bester

26. “I’m not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.”

— Alfred Bester

27. “Every man nurses the secret belief that were he God he could do the job much better.”

— Alfred Bester

28. “She walks. She talks. She adapts. She has been conditioned to respond to the highest bidder.”

— Alfred Bester

29. “We always do what’s natural, only sometimes we shouldn’t do it.”

— Alfred Bester

30. “Listen, normals! You must learn what it is. You must learn how it is. You must tear the barriers down. You must tear the veils away. We see the truth you cannot see... That there is nothing in man but love and faith, courage and kindness, generosity and sacrifice. All else is only the barrier of your blindness. One day we’ll all be mind to mind and heart to heart...”

— Alfred Bester

31. “I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great.”

— Alfred Bester

32. “Don’t ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.”

— Alfred Bester

33. “I’ve handed life and death back to the people who do the living and the dying.”

— Alfred Bester

34. “As a class they are lazy, irresponsible, immature. They are incapable of producing contemporary fiction because they know nothing about life, cannot reflect life, and have no adult comment to make about life. They are silly, childish people who have taken refuge in science fiction where they can establish their own arbitrary rules about reality to suit their own inadequacy. And like most neurotics, they cherish the delusion that they’re “special.”

— Alfred Bester

35. “You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.”

— Alfred Bester

36. “Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you.”

— Alfred Bester

37. “Cellar Christians!” Foyle exclaimed. He and Robin peered through the window. Thirty worshippers of assorted faiths were celebrating the New Year with a combined and highly illegal service. The twenty-fifth century had not yet abolished God, but it had abolished organized religion.”

— Alfred Bester

38. “He was afflicted with an education and a sense of humor. He was inspired by a purpose. He was armed with a phone book. He was doomed.”

— Alfred Bester

39. “Every child in the world imagines that its phantasy world is unique to itself. Psychiatry knows that the joys and terrors of private phantasies are a common heritage shared by all mankind. Fears, guilts, terrors, and shames could be interchanged, from one man to the next, and none would notice the difference.”

— Alfred Bester

40. “The law makes the silliest damned fuss about death. People die by the thousands everyday; but simply because someone has had the energy and enterprise to assist old D’Courtney to his demise, the law insists on turning him into an enemy of the people. I think it’s idiotic, but please don’t quote me.”

— Alfred Bester

41. “We were mugged by some senior citizens on the way from the chopper to the main gate, but no great harm done; they were using vintage revolvers.”

— Alfred Bester

42. “It was not exasperation... It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.”

— Alfred Bester

43. “You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of the Holy Darwin. Most scientific.”

— Alfred Bester

44. “If you can have everything at fifty that you wanted when you were fifteen, you’re happy.”

— Alfred Bester

45. “Century also had shelves of obsolete printed books.”

— Alfred Bester

46. “One of the things that everybody knows about space travel but never mentions is its aphrodisiac quality.”

— Alfred Bester

47. “Mayo was again awakened by the clatter of dispossessed ducks.”

— Alfred Bester

48. “The difference between a Welfare State and a Benevolent Despot is slight.”

— Alfred Bester

49. “So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived and he died. After thirty years of existence and six months of torture, Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man was no more. The key turned in the lock of his soul and the door was opened. What emerged expunged the Common Man for ever.”

— Alfred Bester

50. “The jaunting age had crystallized the hoboes, tramps and vagabonds of the world into a new class. It followed the night from east to west, always in darkness, always in search of loot, the leavings of disaster, carrion. If earthquake shattered a warehouse, they were jacking it the following night. If fire opened a house or explosion split the defenses of a shop, they jaunted in and scavenged. They called themselves Jack-Jaunters. They were jackals.”

— Alfred Bester