15 quotes
People will generally make whatever compromises with the world they think necessary still to convince themselves that they are the most important thing in it.
Transition (2009)
Refusing to do a finite amount of good because you cannot do an infinite amount of good is a morally perverse position.
Transition (2009)
Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you’re told you deserve whatever you get.
Transition (2009)
It’s even more important to prosecute police who’ve broken the law than it is to prosecute anybody else, because otherwise nobody trusts the police.
Transition (2009)
Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.
Transition (2009)
Any argument or point of view that makes solipsism look no less likely may be discounted.
Transition (2009)
One of the wisest things anybody ever said to me was that if all you ever care about is money, money is all that will ever care for you.
Transition (2009)
Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.
Transition (2009)
Madame d’Ortolan was, she liked to think, of elegant middle age, though to the casual observer this might imply that she expected to live to be about one hundred and twenty.
Transition (2009)
“I was being sarcastic.”
“I know. I was seeing your sarcasm and raising you deadpan literalness.”
Transition (2009)
We had to assume that solipsism was nonsense because otherwise everything else around us was nonsense and irrelevant, and the result of a kind of self-inflicted deceit.
Transition (2009)
Whenever one was struck by a previously unlikely-seeming idea that had come to appear plausible or even sensible, one ought to apply that test: was it inherently any more likely than solipsism? If solipsism seemed to make just as much sense, then the idea could be dismissed.
Transition (2009)
It is an insane conceit. Power always drives to perpetuate itself, but this is a phenomenal extra distillation of idiocy. Only people already riddled with the internalised special pleading and self-importance that too much power brings could even start to imagine that this might be in any way sustainable.
Transition (2009)
Beyond the beginning, nothing. At the beginning, a torrent of universes in a single timeless blink that is the mother and father of all explosions and is the opposite of an explosion, destroying nothing – destroying nothing but Nothing – but purely creating; snapping into existence the first semblance of order and chaos and the very idea of time, all at once.
Transition (2009)
The old and powerful never want to let go. They always think they’re both profoundly indispensable and uniquely right. They are always wrong. Part of the function of ageing and dying is to let the next generation have its say, its time in the sun, to sweep away the mistakes of the previous age while, if they’re lucky, retaining the advances made and the benefits accrued.
Transition (2009)