111 quotes
Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone.
Origin (2001)
Bzya touched his shoulder. “But that’s why you and I are here, old man. To keep the world away from boys like Farr and Cris—to give them a place that seems as stable and eternal as your parents did when you were a child—until they are old enough to cope with the truth.”
Flux (1993)
You can observe for yourself the degradation of the air and water around us. The earth has a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of human industry, and with enough development, the planet could even be rendered uninhabitable.
The Time Ships (1995)
Maura pulled an elaborate face. “Don’t these people realize the cat is already out of the bag? You can’t control the public’s access to information anymore—and you certainly can’t control their response. Nor should you try, in my opinion.”
Space (2000)
We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.
Ultima (2014)
If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.
Evolution (2002)
I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils.
Time (1999)
The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.
The Time Ships (1995)
The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.
Evolution (2002)
The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger.
Time (1999)
When everybody else was snuggling at the drive-in, you used to lecture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity.
But is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?
Origin (2001)
Malenfant had moved his corporation here, out of New York, five years ago. A good place for business, he said. God bless Nevada. Distract the marks with gambling toys and virtual titties while you pick their pockets.
Time (1999)
This remains a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had use them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everyone employed.
Time (1999)
Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own.
Time (1999)
Hutton became very critical of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt he wrote, ‘I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve themselves.’
Ages in Chaos (2003)
Ussher’s intense and obsessive project seems very odd to the eyes of a modern scientist. After all he had deduced the age of the Earth without looking at a scrap of physical evidence—not a single rock.
Ages in Chaos (2003)
It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level...A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.
Timelike Infinity (1992)
In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds
Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse—
In the chthonic silence—
All that could have been done had been done.
In peace and satisfaction, minds diffuse and antique submitted to the End Time.
Ultima (2014)
“The only advantage of e-therapists,” Maura murmured, “is that their horseshit is cheaper than humans’.”
Time (1999)
No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.
Origin (2001)