Joseph > Joseph's Quotes

“Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!”
― Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth's Past: The Three-Body Trilogy

“Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure”
― Tacitus

“Focus on making yourself better, not on thinking that you are better.”
― Bohdi Sanders, The Secrets of Worldly Wisdom: Your Key to Unlocking Success

“A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space

“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“is a broken man an outlaw?"

"More or less." Brienne answered.

Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.
"Then they get a taste of battle.
"For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe.
"They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.

"If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chicken's, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world...

"And the man breaks.

"He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well”
― George R.R. Martin

“Scotch whisky is made from barley and the morning dew on angel's nipples.”
― Warren Ellis

“Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.”
― Warren Ellis

“The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.”
― Warren Ellis

“I am for that thing in your genome that demands it. I am for that thing which keeps you animals alive. I am, at most, a slice of monkey suspended within the stuff of universal intelligence. You are a monkey in nice clothes.

In the harsh environment you refer to as a habitable planet, group behaviors are required to survive long enough to procreate. Since you are stupid monkeys, you have no natural affinity for group altruism.

And so you have evolved a genetic pump that delivers pleasant chemicals to your monkey brains. One that is triggered by awe and fear of an anthropomorphism of your environment. Earth mothers. Sky gods. Bits of bush that catch fire. Interesting-looking rocks. An oddly-shaped branch. You’re not fussy.

When your brain does this idiot work, you stop in front of that bump or stick and consider it fiercely. Other monkeys will, like as not, stop next to you and emulate you. Your genetic pump delivers morphine for your souls. You have your fellow monkeys join in. Perhaps so they can feel it too. Perhaps because you feel it might please the stick god to have more monkeys gaze at it in narcotic awe.

The group must be defended. Because as many monkeys as possible must please the stick god, and you can continue to get your fix off praying to it.

You draw up rules to organize and protect the group. Two hundred thousand years later, you put Adolf Hitler into power. Because you are, after all, just monkeys.

I am your stash.”
― Warren Ellis, Supergod

“These things are going to look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we’re not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you. We simply don’t have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.”
― Warren Ellis, Crécy

“Tradition is a foolish man's excuse for not thinking”
― Joshua Ayala-Arias

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“And now we know that this is the journey that must be made by every civilization: awakening inside a cramped cradle, toddling out of it, taking flight, flying faster and farther, and, finally, merging with the fate of the universe as one. The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“I don’t have much to say except a warning. Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about heading into outer space without looking back, please reconsider. The cost you must pay is far greater than you could imagine. *”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“That’s right. Five minutes into the all-hands meeting, the fundamental values of this totalitarian society had received the support of the vast majority of the crew. So, let me tell you, when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“In the eternal night of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, two civilization had swept through like two shooting stars, and the universe had remembered their light.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“Even Coca-Cola probably tasted medicinal the first time you tried it. Anything addictive is like that.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“On the day of the universe's Last Judgment, two humans and a robot belonging to the Earth and Trisolaran civilizations embraced each other in ecstasy.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“Cheng Xin now recalled the strange feeling she had experienced each time she had looked at Van Gogh’s painting. Everything else in the painting—the trees that seemed to be on fire, and the village and mountains at night—showed perspective and depth, but the starry sky above had no three-dimensionality at all, like a painting hanging in space. Because the starry night was two-dimensional. How could Van Gogh have painted such a thing in 1889? Did he, having suffered a second breakdown, truly leap across five centuries”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“Even if God were here, it wouldn’t do any good. The entire human race has reached the point where no one is listening to their prayers.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness, and shut the door firmly.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Peoples think I’s a harmless idiot,” he said. “They’s only half right.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revenger

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

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien