Daniel Hoare > Daniel's Quotes

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“We're spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.
Because that was always true. The Abbey and Eudoxia were small enough it became impossible to ignore it, but even among the teeming billions of Earth, they were spending their lives together. They needed to be gentle. And understanding. And careful. It had been true in the depths of history, and at the height of Earth's power, and it would be true now that they were scattering to the more than a thousand new suns.
Maybe, if they could find a way to be gentle, the stars would be better off with them.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“The magic word is oops,”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“In his opinion, faith was generally for people who were bad at math.”
― James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising

“She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year- old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”
― Frank Herbert

“Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It's attractive because it's simple, it's direct, it's almost always available as an option. When you can't think of a good rebuttal for your opponent's argument, you can always punch them in the face.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban’s War

“It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“I remain to be convinced that Jacob Rees-Mogg has not at least considered ingesting his young.”
― James Felton, Sunburn: The Unofficial History of the Sun Newspaper in 99 Headlines

“The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger

“Right,” Holden said. “No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“And ... and what is civilisation if it isn’t people talking to each other over a goddamned beer?”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“Choosing to stand by while people kill each other is also an action,”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“It’s not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.” At”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“It wasn’t as though they had a second Earth to use as a control. History itself was a massive n = 1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins and what parts of it don’t count.”
― James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising

“I actually read history. It’s like reading prophecy, you know.”
― James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising