Stowaway to Mars Quotes

“I never knew the joy, energy and ambitions which are in youth - yet I know the loss and I feel that I have been robbed of my heritage. You can dream of the future and of your children's future: we can dream of nothing but the past.”
― John Wyndham, Stowaway to Mars

“You are determined to assume an antagonism between machines and men. You don't understand them. It's your persistent mishandling of them that makes you afraid of them. Why should there be an antagonism? There was a time when we could not exist without them nor they without us, and now, thought that no longer holds, the collaboration continues. Doubtless if they wished they could make an end of us today, but why should they? We are doomed inevitably; they will go on.”
― John Wyndham, Stowaway to Mars

“Yet we still have countless people who regard men and machinery as separable. They think of the machine as a mere adjunct to life, something which gives faster communication, more production, more entertainment, still failing to see it as one of the great factors in our real lives, and not realizing that our people are as they are because of it. One hears of the Industrial Revolution as though it were a mere phase, finished and done with. It is not, and it shows no sign of ever being completed. And "Industrial Revolution!" — just as though it were like any little turnover of government. the machine came, and life could never be the same again: nor can it be static. But to what further changes is it leading us?”
― John Wyndham, Stowaway to Mars

“For ever and for ever seeking knowledge. And we don't even know why we seek it. It's an instinct, like self-preservation; and about as comprehensible. Why, I wonder, do I keep on living? I know that I've got to die sooner or later, yet I take the best care I can that it shall be later instead of finishing the thing off in a reasonable manner. After all, I've done my bit — propagated my species, and yet for some inscrutable reason I want to go on living and learning. Just an instinct. Some kink in the evolutionary process caused this passion for knowledge, and the result is man — an odd little creature, scuttling around and piling up mountains of this curious commodity.”
― John Wyndham, Stowaway to Mars

“Why wasn't the Earth big enough for them? It must be a queer kind of man who could find so little of interest in all the five continents and seven seas that he wished to shoot himself out into the emptiness of space.”
― John Wyndham, Stowaway to Mars