15 quotes
The nice thing about being a pessimist is that bittersweet is an improvement.
Millennium (1983)
Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it.
Millennium (1983)
Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.
Millennium (1983)
"The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve."
Millennium (1983)
“Don’t be such a pessimist.”
“All time travelers are pessimists.”
Millennium (1983)
I don’t have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in action, and I can tell you, it stinks.
Millennium (1983)
Me, I don’t know if I was born a pessimist or had pessimism thrust upon me. What I do you know is that I’ve had ample reason to embrace the philosophy.
Millennium (1983)
Sherman looked surprised as an infallible Pope holding a losing ticket at the racetrack.
Millennium (1983)
I hate inefficiency. You’d have to look a long long ways before you found a better example of it than the press conference.
Millennium (1983)
By then I was sure the universe could no longer surprise me, nor interest me. I was wrong. It managed to do both in no more than ten minutes.
Millennium (1983)
News is, by definition, bad news.
Millennium (1983)
I sat on the bed and read the Gideon Bible until the food came. That Gideon sure had a weird sense of humor. Try “The Book of Genesis.”
Millennium (1983)
We speak of the rigid framework of events, but the fact is there is some leeway. Apparently things tend to happen the way they should happen, according to whatever plan was dictated by whoever’s in charge of this stinking universe. Changes, if they are minor, correct themselves in ways no one understands but which tend to make a hash of anybody’s theory of free will.
Millennium (1983)
Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart. They’re just fast. They can be programmed to act smart, but then it’s the programmer who’s actually smart and not the computer. If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it. And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart.
Millennium (1983)
You can define heroism any way you want to, but that’s it for me. It’s sticking in there no matter what. Whether it’s a pilot fighting his plane down through that last mile, or switchboard operators and doctors and nurses staying at their posts while the bombs blitz London, or even the dance band on the Titanic playing while the ship goes down…
It’s fulfilling your responsibilities.
Millennium (1983)