The Midwich Cuckoos Quotes

“Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“…after all, what is a planet but an island in space?”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“It is because nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilisation.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Personal honesty takes time to assert itself - if it is ever allowed to.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by "Mother Nature". Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul - unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“We have both been given the same wish to survive, We are all, you see, toys of the life-force. It made you numerically stronger, but mentally undeveloped. It made us mentally strong but physically weak: now it has set us at one another, to see what will happen. A cruel sport perhaps, from both our points of view, but a very very old one. Cruelty is as old as life itself. There is some improvement: humour and compassion are the most important of human inventions; but they are not very firmly established yet, though promising well. But the life-force is a lot stronger than they are; and it won't be denied its blood-sports.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“You are judging by social rules and finding crime. I am considering an elemental struggle, and finding no crime - just grim, primeval danger”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Odd, don’t you think? We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us – but these creatures we shall carefully rear.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“sham idealists: the quite large number of people who profess ideals as a form of premium for other-life insurance, and are content to lay up slavery and destitution for their descendants so long as they are enabled to produce personal copybooks of elevated views at the gate of heaven.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“In Oppley they're smart, and in Stouch they're smarmy, but Midwich folk are just plain barmy”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Soldiering’ll soon be nothing but wizards and wires.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“They persisted in the face of discouragement until they gained the kind of acceptance accorded to the inevitable.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“The laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species - against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“It is true that the institution of marriage as it is proclaimed by Church and state displays a depressingly mechanistic attitude of mind towards partnership – one not unlike, in fact, that of Noah.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“And God said,' quoted Mr Leebody, ' "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Very well, then, what are these Children? What are they? The image does not mean the outer image, or every statue would be a man. It means the inner image, the spirit and the soul. But you have told me, and, on the evidence, I came to believe it, that the Children do not have individual spirits - that they have one man-spirit, and one woman-spirit, each far more powerful than we understand, that they share between them. What, then, are they? They cannot be what we know as man, for this inner image is on a different pattern - its likeness is to something else.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“So much damned secrecy nowadays that nobody knows anything. Don't know what the other chap has; don't even know what you may have to use yourself. All these scientist fellers in back rooms ruining the profession. Can't keep up with what you don't know. Soldiering'll soon be nothing but wizards and wires.”
― john wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“A fruitlessly worrying male is a nuisance. The best thing he can do is to disguise his worry, and stand staunchly by, impersonating a pillar of strength while performing certain practical and organizational services. I offer you the fruit of somewhat intensive experience.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“We don’t seem to be good at integrating novelties with our social lives, do we? The world of the etiquette book fell to pieces at the end of the last century, and there has been no code of manners to tell us how to deal with anything invented since. Not even rules for an individualist to break, which is itself another blow at freedom. Rather a pity, don’t you think?”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“It’s all very well for a man. He doesn’t have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he’s always on the outside. He can never know what it’s like, even in a normal way – so what sort of an idea can he have of this? – Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? – As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator.… And then go on wondering, hour after hour, night after night, what – just what it may be that one is being forced to incubate. Of course you can’t understand how that feels – how could you! It’s degrading, it’s intolerable. I shall crack soon. I know I shall. I can’t go on like this much longer.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“As a securely dominant species you could afford to lose touch with reality, and amuse yourselves with abstractions,”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle? I do not think you are decadent enough for that.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species—against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Far away in South Kensington Mrs”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“In vain did I try to convince her that it would be no less remarkable wherever it should happen. She felt that it was decidedly a thing that would be less remarkable in more exotic places -- a Balinese village, perhaps, or a Mexican pueblo; that it was essentially one of those sorts of things that happens to other people.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“The true fruit of this century has little interest in coming to living-terms with innovations; it just greedily grabs them all as they come along. Only when it encounters something really big does it become aware of a social problem at all, and then, rather than make concessions, it yammers for the impossibly easy way out, uninvention, suppression”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos