Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Bryan Appleyard

That books, a commodity little changed since Caxton's day, should have turned out to be the trailblazers of retailing on the internet is one of the stranger cultural ironies of our time. If you've bought one thing on the net, the newest and most prodigiously high-tech communications system imaginable, then it is almost certain to be a book, the oldest and simplest.

Scientists themselves are of surprisingly little help. They find it difficult to talk of what they do because they tend to assume detailed knowledge is required for generalities to be understood. They find it hard to grasp the concept of the meaning of their work, assuming this to be a debate that takes place at a lower level than the specialized discussions with their colleagues. When they do generalize, - or "popularize" as it is usually called with a noticeable degree of contempt - they tend to reveal a startling philosophical naiveté.

In AI, Spielberg is bleaching the dirt out of the human mind and leaving behind only the vacant gaze of machine 'love'. Coca Cola ads do much the same thing - and they don't take two hours.

Of course, the other thing about evolution is that anything can be said because very little can be disproved. Experimental evidence is minimal.

Science has taken away our religion.

Information is the new atom or electron, the fundamental building block of the universe ... We now see the world as entirely made of information: it's bits all the way down.

Nobody, 20 years ago, forecast the Internet.

Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

On the maps provided by science, we find everything except ourselves.

If a large number of people who are convinced alien abductions are real are hypnotising even larger numbers of others who suspect they might be, then it is likely there will be many alien abduction narratives flying around, as, indeed, there are. Of course, this is not proof they are not true, but it does provide a persuasive context for a simple psychosocial explanation. Hypnotism is a technique that triggers a mass storytelling project in which all the stories are linked.

The cyborg is now the ideal to which all our most advanced technology is tending.

It is...idle to pretend, as many do, that there is no contradiction between religion and science. Science contradicts religion as surely as Judaism contradicts Islam-they are absolutely and irresolvably conflicting views. Unless, that is, science is obliged to change its fundamental nature.

Capitalism is a forest fire that is never extinguished, only contained.