TV Quote of the Day (‘The Twilight Zone,’ on ‘Weapons That Are Simply Thoughts’)

Rod Serling [Closing Narration]: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”— The Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 22, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” original air date Mar. 4, 1960, teleplay by Rod Serling, directed by Ron Winston

Quote of the Day (Martin Amis, on How Utopia Becomes Dystopia)

“Every imagined Utopia, from Plato to the present day, helplessly becomes a Dystopia, almost certainly because the writers just couldn’t resist the urge to make the ‘place’ sound halfway interesting. Otherwise the Perfect Society is perfectly inhuman and perfectly inane. What would you do all day in Utopia? And who now would turn to a map of the world in a vain quest for the wastelands called Never Has Been, Never Could Be and Never Should Be?”—English novelist-essayist Martin Amis, “The Deadliest Idealism,” in The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 22, 2017,  collected in The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage,1994-2017 (2018)

(Photo of Martin Amis taken at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, by Larry D. Moore.)