Ken MacLeod > Quotes

“Change the problem by changing your mind.”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“If you're interested, you'll be there.”
― Ken Macleod

“I knew from the beginning it was hopeless, but it's possible to love without hope.”
― Ken MacLeod, Cosmonaut Keep

“There’s a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy.”
― Ken MacLeod, Descent

“For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn't work.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction

“Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear fucking weapons.”
― Ken MacLeod

“She read it over, decided it was too complicated for Memo, and ran it through an app called MyTxt4Dummies.”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“Green humanism? What's that? Humanism for little green men?”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction

“Orgel’s rule—“Evolution is smarter than you”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“...syn bio tech had come on stream, springing full-grown from the bench like the Incredible Hulk bursting his lab coat, a great green monster that sucked carbon dioxide from the air and sprouted wood, pissed oil, and shat diamonds.”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“Carlyle spread her hands. ‘I speculated that it was the remains of the starship that took the Eurydiceans to the planet. This seems to have been borne out.’ She smiled. ‘It transmitted a defensive virus that contained Microsoft patches.”
― Ken MacLeod, Newton's Wake

“That there was no God was a given, as far as Hope was concerned, and being nice to people and making the most of your life struck her as a reasonable enough conclusion to draw from it, and in any case what she wanted to do. But besides the spires of theology and the watch-towers of ideology, it seemed a very shaky hut indeed, and not one that offered her much shelter or would stand up in court.
She couldn't see a way to make her objection to the fix a deduction from any body of thought. It came from a body of flesh, her own, and that was enough for her. She doubted that this would be enough for anyone else.”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“On this rock we had built our church. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division

“Shooting arrows at the iron horses of Manifest Destiny.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division

“...on the one hand faith kids and nature kids and on the other the rest, those you might call, under your breath of course, New Kids? Were these a centimetre taller than others of their age, a glimmer brighter of eye, a syllable more articulate? A step ahead in the race, a pace more sure-footed? A decibel less loud?”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“But isn't it enough that I just don't want it?"
"No," said Fiona. "It isn't enough."
"Why not?"
"Well, if that was enough, if just saying no and not giving a reason was enough, where would we be? It would just be chaos.”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“Oh, no," Hope said. "I'm not. No, I don't believe in all that, but it's - well, it's two things. One is my job, you know? In China? So I'm all for that side of it, the war and so on; we really have to, you know, defeat those people. And the other is, uh, my husband. He's from the Highlands and he's half native, as he puts it, and I don't know if you know what the people up there are like, but I swear if he even thought I was going to vote any other way he'd walk out on me.”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“Whatever the truth about the Deliverer, she will remain in my mind as she was shown on that statue, and all the other statues and murals, songs and stories: riding, at the head of her own swift cavalry, with a growing migration behind her and a decadent, vulnerable, defenceless and rich continent ahead; and, floating bravely above her head and above her army, the black flag on which nothing is written.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Sky Road

“Do AIS dream in electric sleep?

He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction

“As far as I was concerned, the best thing one could do for the poor was to not add one’s self to their number.”
― Ken MacLeod, Descent

“The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission.”
― Ken MacLeod, Cosmonaut Keep

“The eighties?’ I said. ‘As in, the nineteen-eighties? The decade that taste forgot? Honest, Sophie, ask your granny. Ask mine, if you like. She’ll tell you the only good thing about it was that the internet and phone cameras weren’t invented, well hardly anyway, so most of the awful photos are lying out of sight in drawers and shoeboxes.”
― Ken MacLeod, Descent

“That evening, Hope wrote a letter to her MP, Jack Crow. She found no difficulty at all in composing it, but quite a bit in writing it. She hadn't hand-written an entire page since primary school. In the end she found an app on her glasses that sampled her handwriting and turned it into a font that looked like her handwriting would if it had been regular, and printed it off. There was even an app for the printer that indented the paper a little, and an ink that looked like ballpoint ink.”
― Ken MacLeod, Intrusion

“It’s elementary chaos theory, or to give it its popular designation—Murphy’s Law. Random changes happen all the time. Mistakes accumulate. Correcting them brings further changes. As someone smarter than me once said, evolution is smarter than you.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“the mercy of intellects with no mercy and lots of curiosity?”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“It seemed implausible that an actual enhancement of cognitive processing could have been missed, with so many experimenters so keen to come up with justifications for their professional or recreational activities;”
― Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction

“people think they have more life to lose if they have a long one to look forward to – but I think it’s a false logic. A long life of oppression or shame is worse than a short one, after all.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Sky Road

“Borges? ‘The Library of Babel’?”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“The argument that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it failed to impress most people, convinced as they were that there was no risk whatsoever of history’s more ruinous errors being repeated.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Sky Road