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The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ... soon.

— Vernor Vinge The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)

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More quotes by Vernor Vinge

Quit crossing your fingers, Wim; the only thing that’ll ever save you from is the respect of educated men.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001)

The hard facts are extraordinary, without adding superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

Funny how the least attempt at deception always seems to make life more complicated.

A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

We realize that this means the destruction of solar systems, but consider the alternative.

A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)

Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.

A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

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If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Vernor Vinge (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.