23 quotes
Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.
Earth (1990)
Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can’t afford anymore.
Earth (1990)
Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.
Earth (1990)
A hallmark of sanity, Alex, is the courage to face even unpleasant points of view.
Earth (1990)
Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.
Earth (1990)
We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
Earth (1990)
The man talked, but somehow nothing he said seemed to make any sense.
Earth (1990)
History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.
Earth (1990)
From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous.
Earth (1990)
Beware of assumptions that seem “obvious” in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.
Earth (1990)
Prison for the crime of puberty—that was how secondary school had seemed, when he really thought back on it.
Earth (1990)
“Huh,” Sepak thought, marveling how much one could learn by just sitting still and observing. It wasn’t a skill one learned in the frenetic pace of modern society.
Earth (1990)
One of life’s joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks...who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it.
Earth (1990)
The lesson they took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before a man or woman gives a tinker’s damn about anything as large as a planet.
Earth (1990)
What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.
Earth (1990)
“All this talk of using tax policy to ‘assess social costs’...what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.”
Earth (1990)
Nelson replayed his last musings to himself, and silently laughed. Listen to you! Jen was right. You're a born philosopher. In other words, full of shit.
Earth (1990)
It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.
Earth (1990)
The good side of the world media village was the sense it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely new.
Earth (1990)
Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads. To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn’t take everything else to the grave with it.
Earth (1990)