Simon > Simon's Quotes

“When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off.

Note: Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb)”
― Richard Dawkins

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
― Richard Dawkins

“He’s stuck out there. He thinks he’s totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man’s psychology?” He turned back to Venkat. “I wonder what he’s thinking right now.”

LOG ENTRY: SOL 61 How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain and became the deadliest species ever in the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“The truth is, Rosemary, that you are capable of anything. Good or bad. You always have been, and you always will be. Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. You think every soldier who picked up a cutter gun was a bad person? No. She was just doing what the soldier next to her was doing, who was doing what the soldier next to her was doing, and so on and so on. And I bet most of them — not all, but most — who made it through the war spent a long time after trying to understand what they’d done. Wondering how they ever could have done it in the first place. Wondering when killing became so comfortable.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes.”
“What causes the other ten percent?” asked Kizzy.
“Natural disasters,” said Nib.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“if human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Absolution Gap

“Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!”
― Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

“Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that."
~"Understanding Space & Time”
― Alastair Reynolds, Zima Blue and Other Stories

“Nothing endures, except nothing itself.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

“You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City

“Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.’

- "Zima Blue" by Alastair Reynolds”
― Alastair Reynolds

“History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?”
― Alastair Reynolds, Thousandth Night / Minla's Flowers

“Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“Could kindness – by only ever taking little steps – twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty?”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revenger

“An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

“Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too - I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart?”
― Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City

“Calvin raised his fingers in lazy acknowledgement. “So . . .” he said. “The shit’s about to match coordinates with the fan.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”
― Douglas Hofstadter

“Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not. ”
― Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth... because they live on in a 'second neural home'?... In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them... Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain... a collective corona that still glows.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter

“The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid