Alfred Bester Quotes

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.

I was never a skilled artist or anything like that - never a rebel.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

Unless you hit your television with a sledgehammer, you're not going to be able to be an individual.

I think trying to be offbeat is the most boring thing possible.

Yes, I think I am a genius, but not a rebel.

The American people ... have a stake in con-conformity, for they know that the American genius is non-conformist.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

I hate anything that seems like something that has been done.

There's not enough people being daring and different. There are a lot of followers in hip-hop.

Who says what is the right way and what isn't? That is some imagined social construct that people made up to feel okay about being average.

We never want to toe the line.

Seek freedom from the conformity of styles

I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.

The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything - literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient.

Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say that a noncomformist is a blight on society. But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, that one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her culture.

People want you to be ordinary. They don't like it when people are different. They don't like it when a man soars over their heads while they stand in the dirt. People hate you when you're special; it reminds them of everything that they aren't.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.

All art is based on non-conformity.