J. G. Ballard Short Quotes

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In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

J. G. Ballard
God was a clever idea … The human race came up with a winner there.

J. G. Ballard
Psychiatrists — the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War...

J. G. Ballard
Some refer to it as a cultural Chernobyl. I think of it as a cultural Stalingrad.
Of Euro Disney

J. G. Ballard
I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.

J. G. Ballard
I'm never happier than when I can write about draining swimming pools and abandoned hotels.

J. G. Ballard
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

J. G. Ballard
After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.

J. G. Ballard
The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself.

J. G. Ballard
Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.

J. G. Ballard
The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.

J. G. Ballard
Science fiction is the apocalyptic literature of the twentieth century, the authentic language of Auschwitz, Eniwetok and Aldermaston.

J. G. Ballard
I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.

J. G. Ballard
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

J. G. Ballard
The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.

J. G. Ballard
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

J. G. Ballard
Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.

J. G. Ballard
My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.

J. G. Ballard
The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.

J. G. Ballard
However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.

J. G. Ballard
The president of the United States bears about as much relationship to the real business of running America as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken.

J. G. Ballard
Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.

J. G. Ballard
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use these languages, or we remain mute.

J. G. Ballard
I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.

J. G. Ballard
Nonetheless, Scranton had travelled in space. He had known the loneliness of separation from all other human beings, he had gazed at the empty perspectives that I myself had seen.

J. G. Ballard
In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant.

J. G. Ballard
Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

J. G. Ballard
'Responsible' TV is far more dangerous than the most mindless entertainment. At its worst, American TV merely trivializes the already trivial, while British TV consistently trivializes the serious.

J. G. Ballard