Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
I’m saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn’t matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.
I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
The bomb lives only as it is falling.
One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.
What’s one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.
It’s a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those.
He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.
One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.
One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.
It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting – corruption and favoritism, mostly – endemic to the system.
I’ve always loved Scotland, and I’m not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I’m not sure I would want to live in one again.
There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
I’m a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.