Mark

“As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“People—human-type people, my own people—are constantly on a quest for an identity. Some lucky ones find the thing they want to be already inside themselves, or in a healthy family or community. Far too many of us, however, latch onto a simplified externality that seems to offer all the answers and invest our sense of meaning in it. We make some half-baked philosophy our driving force. Something we picked up reading the sort of novels and graphic stuff where first-person narrators opine bombastically about how the galaxy really works and what makes people really tick and How You Ought To Be.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Machine

“Keep testing your guesses against the evidence. Keep trying out new guesses to see if they fit better. Keep looking for new evidence, even if it disproves your old hypotheses. With each step you get just a little closer to that elusive thing called “the truth.”
― Orson Scott Card, Empire

“Among the elite, Stuarts had given way to Smiths, Sirs to Misters, and family names were no longer of help for guessing social standing. But the foundations of inequity remained intact, since the primal urges that have always led humans to seek ascendancy over their kind run deeper than the ebb and flow of social tide. But for as long as people failed to grasp this simple truth they applauded the power of pigheaded toil and lucky foresight to make moguls out of yokels, and found comfort in the belief that social imbalance was only pernicious if it derived from things other than skill, which was seen as a fair gauge of merit, much like swordsmanship had been regarded as a fair measure of worth in the days when disputes were settled by duels.”
― Jacques St-Malo, Cognition