8 quotes
A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
The Light of Other Days (2000)
What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view.
The Light of Other Days (2000)
We always thought the living earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.
The Light of Other Days (2000)
Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.
The Light of Other Days (2000)
Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death...
The Light of Other Days (2000)
The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.
The Light of Other Days (2000)
If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured.
The Light of Other Days (2000)
What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts—indeed, sometimes from no facts—in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control.
The Light of Other Days (2000)