119 quotes
Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
Red Mars (1992)
Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all.
Red Mars (1992)
There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.
Red Mars (1992)
Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate.
Red Mars (1992)
Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics.
Blue Mars (1996)
Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic.
Galileo's Dream (2009)
“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.
”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”
Red Mars (1992)
Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.
Red Mars (1992)
To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses.
Blue Mars (1996)
The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.
The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
But he persevered. That was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma.
Blue Mars (1996)
Now I like climbing as much as anybody, almost, but I am not going to try to claim to you that it is an exceptionally sane activity.
Mother Goddess Of The World (1987)
When she realized what she was doing she snorted in disgust, at herself and at the pervasiveness of politics—how it could infect everything if you let it.
Green Mars (1993)
Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm.
Blue Mars (1996)
Rock is much more malleable than ideas.
The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them.
Green Mars (1993)
Maya was very insistent that they learn their math well. “You’re getting a horrible education,” she would say, shaking her head darkly. “But if you learn your math you can catch up later.”
Green Mars (1993)
There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.
Galileo's Dream (2009)
This vain presumption, of understanding everything, can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the understanding of one single thing, thus truly tasting how knowledge is accomplished, would then recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing.
Galileo's Dream (2009)
It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
Red Mars (1992)