Quotes

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.

The belly craves food, she thinks, The tongue craves water, The heart craves love, and The mind craves stories.

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.

So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to co-exist, than seek to disprove…

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucket-loads of crap. Our analogue ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, metres of ink-ribbon and pints of Tipp-Ex. Poor sods. On the other hand, if digital technology is so superior a midwife of the novel, where are this century’s masterpieces?

Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.

There are two meta lessons after twenty years that keep coming up. Word of mouth is unreasonably effective. You get what you do.

It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.

Wakefulness or enlightenment can be reasonably defined as appreciating the mystery of life in the present moment, while knowing it is the only 'thing' there is. Wakefulness’ opposite – the dissatisfaction brought about by reactive emotions and alienating desire – can be reasonably defined as the futile attempt to ‘get something out of life.’

It was something he’d seen plenty of times in his job, the way that kind of mindset worked, spiralling inwards into itself. Until at some point, the necessity of doing bad things for a good cause became, by the inexorable ratchet of cognitive dissonance, the insistence that doing things the bad way was a virtue in itself. Because otherwise how could one justify all the bad things already done?

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!

To the privileged, equality feels like a step down. Understand this and you understand a lot of populist politics today.

People like to get angry about anything. A lot of the time they’re just looking for an excuse. I feel sorry for them. I think for a lot of people … there’s nothing much going on in their lives. Emotionally. I mean, maybe their marriages have dried up, or everything they do has become a kind of habit, I don’t know. But they don’t feel much. No emotional stimulation. We all need to feel things, don’t we? So, when something makes you angry, at least you’re feeling something. You get that emotional kick.’

Since his first waking, he’d found twenty-second-century technology easy to work. User interfaces seemed to have settled down to common standards some time before he’d been frozen. Even the language had stabilised, more or less, if not the accents; English was spoken across several worlds now and had to stay comprehensible to everybody, and there was a huge mass of recorded culture, all of which tended to keep the language static. The vehicles and vocabularies of the year 2166 were easy. It was the people he couldn’t figure out.

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

Even the most devoted sadist needs a business model, or he will have to get a real job.

Democracy as a method of human interaction is already millennia old. And we know how easy it is to subvert any democratic process. There are endless examples of people using a democratic system as a games-theory framework of rules to achieve their own ends.

If that work is meant to generate a million dollars a month in revenue, and you can decrease the time it takes to finish that work from 12 months to 6 months, the work you're doing is the most important work that could be happening.

None of us can be damned by anyone but ourselves. No one can be forgiven – no one can be redeemed – save by their own heart.’

One of the great tragedies of science is that the increase in its complexity has made most scientists into little more than technicians, driving them into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The further the scientist progresses down into the mine of knowledge, the less she can see the world into which that knowledge fits.

The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.

Paz learned the importance of big ideas but also of the frameworks within which those ideas express themselves. Societies are rule-governed. Whether you’re moving vehicles around an urban grid or shaping and firing clay, the meaning of what you do is socially derived. The collective is the broker of all things.

A united humanity. A humanity without disagreements. A humanity without its varied belief systems, without its national histories, without its assortment of cultures and ethnicities—or at least, a humanity where religion, nation, culture, and ethnicity were entirely lacking in meaning. This would be a humanity without differences; speaking one language only, to avoid misunderstanding; subscribing to one set of moral standards, and rejecting all others. It would be by definition a majority humanity; a universal humanity; a monolith humanity.

Should we tolerate all difference? What if the difference is a question of morality? If it is one person’s sincerely held belief that all individuals who do not belong to their own ethnic group should be killed, conflict arises again at once: with their victims, and with any onlooker whose soul is not a total moral void. So immediately we see that there must be limits to toleration. Who defines the limits?