11 quotes
People would swallow anything, just anything at all. Apparently some people found this dismaying. He thought it was a gift, the most wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the weak-minded.
The Algebraist (2004)
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
The Algebraist (2004)
As military fuck-ups went it was a many-faceted gem, a work of genius, a grapeshot, multi-stage, cluster-warhead, fractal-munition regenerative-weapon-system of a fuck-up.
The Algebraist (2004)
There was some thing almost sublimely elegant, Sal thought, about how perfect a waste of time, people, resources and hard work the whole project had been.
The Algebraist (2004)
Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a set-up, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss.
The Algebraist (2004)
Being spoon-fed rosy-hued misinformation by the authorities was no more than people had come to expect—and preemptively discount. They only got suspicious when presented with what looked like the plain unvarnished truth.
The Algebraist (2004)
They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told.
The Algebraist (2004)
Whether the Dweller List existed or not, everybody appeared to be acting as though it did, and that was all that mattered. It was a bit like money; all about trust, about faith. The value lay in what people believed, not in anything intrinsic.
The Algebraist (2004)
The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more important than the way they appeared to (unless you were talking about public perception, of course, when it was the other way around).
The Algebraist (2004)
The idea of faith interested him, even fascinated him, not as an intellectual idea, not as a concept or some abstract theoretical framework, but as a way of controlling people, as a way of understanding and so manipulating them. As a flaw, in the end, as something which was wrong with others that was not wrong with him.
The Algebraist (2004)
In the old days he had once wondered how many of the Cessorian high command, his old bosses, really believed in the Truth. He strongly suspected that the higher you went, the greater grew the proportion of those who didn’t really believe at all. They were in it for the power, the glory, the control and the glamour.
The Algebraist (2004)