Psychic powers - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Among the mind-readers, politeness never can extend to the point of insincerity, as among talking nations, seeing that it is always one another's real and inmost thought that they read.

- Edward Bellamy, ''ToWhom This May Come'' (1889)

A shallow rectangular pool held goldfish, who gulped hopefully as they swam to the surface and flipped down again. The little minds of the fish lay open to Cody, minds thoughtless as so many bright, tiny, steady flames on little birthday candles, as he walked past the pool.

- Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, ''Humpty Dumpty'' (1953)

Telepathy transmits delicate shades of meaning quite lost in spoken language.

- Robert Sheckley, ''Carrier'' (1954)

You can't have a strategy against telepaths; you have to act randomly. You have to not know what you're going to do next.

- Philip K. Dick, Solar Lottery (1955)

A telepathic society would be more rational.When every little wound in the child's soul could be felt and healed . . . when the thick burden of guilt was laid down, because everyone knew that everyone else had done the same . . . when men could not kill, because soldier and murderer felt the victim die . . .

- Poul Anderson, ''Journeys End'' (1957)

And the creature spoke. Hi, pal, it said. I tradewith you my mind.

- Clifford D. Simak, Time Is the Simplest Thing (1961)

I'm still picking up your mentational processes by way of your cephalic transmitter. [. . .] So I have to warn you: anything you think may be held against you.

- Philip K. Dick, ''We Can Remember It for YouWholesale'' (1966)

Plainly it was one thing to read a mind and another to understand it.

- Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, The Ganymede Takeover (1967)

Like most telepaths, he had learned to ignore the great body of inchoate thoughts in people: hostility, boredom, outright disgust, envy. Thoughts, many of which the person himself was unaware of. A telepath had to learn to have a thick skin. In essence, he had to learn to relate to a person's conscious, positive thoughts, not the vaguely-defined mixture of his unconscious processes.

- Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)

''What is it, exactly, that you pick up with your empathic sensitivity?'' ''Muck,'' the man answered in his high, exasperated voice. ''The psychic excreta of the animal kingdom. I wade through your faeces.''

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''Vaster Than Empires and More Slow'' (1971)

Lasten could hear people's minds. Not their thoughts, for people don't have thoughts inside; Lasten heard emotions and mind-pictures, whatever was strongest in the consciousness of those around him. Red hate, boiling and exploding; sometimes pure fear, blue-white, rigid; sex fantasies that echoed disturbingly in Lasten's own mind.

- Terry Carr, ''Ozymandias'' (1972)

''Can you read my mind?'' [. . .] ''Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind.''

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)