Pierre Boulle Quotes

• “There's always some further action to take.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “I racked my brains to discover some sense in the events I had witnessed. I needed this intellectual exercise to escape from the despair that haunted me, to prove to myself that I was a man, I mean a man from Earth, a reasoning creature who made it a habit to discover a logical explanation for the apparently miraculous whims of nature, and not a beast hunted down by highly developed apes.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “Des hommes raisonnables? Des hommes détenteurs de la sagesse? Des hommes inspirés par l'espirit? ... Non, ce n'est pas possible.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “This time I felt it was impossible that they could entertain further doubt as to my true condition. Alas, I did not yet know the blindness of orangutans!”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot. But what of living creatures possessing a certain degree of intelligence, like apes? And apes, precisely, are endowed with a keen sense of imitation.…”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “In the field of technology, simplification is always an enormous advance...”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “... the heritage of mankind is not the earth but the entire universe,”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “But how could one hold this against her when faced with the perfection of her body? Suddenly”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “The moon, the serene moon, was creating a conflict of opinion in America almost as violent as the racial problem.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “To rise from the national level to the level of mankind, I call that progress. And that's what's so admirable. For a man to progress, once he has reached the White House-I wouldn't have thought it possible.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “When, in the fifteenth century, some audacious mariners who had sailed from Europe discovered America, nothing seemed to justify such a venture in the eyes of their contemporaries. Today, however, we can see it has given birth to the twentieth-century United States. Don't you think the existence of the United States constitutes a valid reason for Columbus's wild scheme...”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “The man who eventually reached the moon would be traveling in a vessel made of earthly materials.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “No country in the world can continue to spend what we are sacrificing for the moon without rapidly being reduced to utter ruin.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “You can ask a President to provide for two years ahead, maybe for twenty or even thirty years, but not for two hundred or a thousand!”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “The army had little attraction for him, but it afforded him the possibility of taking a great step toward his goal. After all, if the military saw fit to replace the body that he was planning to liberate from the earth's gravity with an explosive charge, this was a mere detail, at any rate so far as the preliminary experiments were concerned. Creative science should be able to take advantage, without remorse, of the substantial sums allocated by destructive folly.”

  Pierre Boulle

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• “Be happy in your work" -- Colonel Saito, Bridge on the River Kwai.”

  Pierre Boulle

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