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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0a59fa1 | Ballimore! Ballimore, where's the inkwell?' Dobbilan's voice echoed down the corridor, interrupting Cimorene in mid-sentence. 'Where are you? Why can't I find anything around here when I want it?' 'Because you never look in the right place, dear,' Ballimore called. 'The inkwell is in the kitchen next to the grocery list, where it's been for the past six months, and I'm in the dining room. Which is where you'd be if you'd done what I asked .. | marriage | Patricia C. Wrede | |
| 65b1827 | Starting is good. You can't get anywhere at all if you never start. | Patricia C. Wrede | ||
| adc31ed | Your levity is unbecoming, Richard, and not at all the point,' Mrs Lowe said, giving him a stern look.'In another week, the Season will be upon us, and as you have chosen to come to Town for once, I shall expect you to find a little more time for your social and family obligations.' 'Oh, you may expect whatever you like, Aunt.' Mairelon's tone was careless, but there was a set to his shoulders that told Kim he was not pleased. | Patricia C Wrede | ||
| af66f46 | On THE AMBER SPYGLASS: "If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned." | literature philip-pullman plotting | John C. Wright | |
| eaa1492 | But all these systems of 'education' lack provisions for freedom of experiment, for training and for expression of creative abilities by those who are to be taught. In this respect also all our pedagogues are behind the times. | James C. Scott | ||
| a97d92d | Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs, "the public peace--the sidewalk and street peace--of cities ... is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves... | James C. Scott | ||
| 0124ab1 | Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as "our living ancestors," "what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism and civilization." on the contrary, I argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-maki.. | James C. Scott | ||
| 7461a8d | They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers. | muteness-memories myth reflections | C. G. Jung | |
| 06ef32b | Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do? | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| bfffc7b | The Lassans were insatiably inquisitive, and the concept of privacy was almost unknown to them. A Please Do Not Disturb sign was often regarded as a personal challenge, which led to interesting complications... | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| b1054c3 | Myron, like countless NCO's before him, had discovered the ideal compromise between power and responsibility. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 9b08d1d | It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 7b2b045 | Absence of noise is not a natural condition; all human senses require some input. If they are deprived of it, the mind manufactures its own substitutes. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 598c2e5 | There's an ancient philosophical joke that's much subtler than it seems. Question: Why is the Universe here? Answer: Where else would it be? | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 8a6b4b2 | There was awe, and there was also incredulity--sheer disbelief that the dead Moon, of all worlds, could have sprung this fantastic surprise. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| c90c91e | No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges--absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV! | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d14c6f5 | Don't forget, as you enjoy your mild spring days and peaceful summer evenings, how lucky you are to live in the temperate region of the Solar System, where the air never freezes and the rocks never melt... Earthlight by Arthur C. Clarke | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| cf18bb8 | They would probably never even know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. When | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 90d145b | That requires as much power as a small radio transmitter--and rather similar skills to operate. For it's the application of the power, not its amount, that matters. How long do you think Hitler's career as a dictator of Germany would have lasted, if wherever he went a voice was talking quietly in his ear? Or if a steady musical note, loud enough to drown all other sounds and to prevent sleep, filled his brain night and day? Nothing brutal, .. | passivity world | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| 28c5f06 | You will find men like him in all the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e3e987e | Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 88c450f | The dismantling of the vast and wholly parasitic armaments industry had given an unprecedented--sometimes, indeed, unhealthy--boost to the world economy. No longer were vital raw materials and brilliant engineering talents swallowed up in a virtual black hole--or, even worse, turned to destruction. Instead, they could be used to repair the ravages and neglect of centuries, by rebuilding the world. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| edb2422 | all that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| f3724fa | Could we go into your room?" she asked. "I knew it. I knew it," he said, spinning around and sliding quickly toward his door. "It's finally happend, just like in dreams. An intelligent, beautiful woman is going to declare her undying affection" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 580d4c5 | Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity. | gravity | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| f823469 | And eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, it was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last in the eternal truce of complete symbiosis.... But | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 64fb5f9 | All bureaucracies are the same. They drain the life out of the truly creative people and develop mindless paper-pushers as their critical mass. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 362d243 | a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom. | mind | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| 9aef405 | Tom hated to admit defeat, even in matters far less important than this. He believed that all problems could be solved if they were tackled in the right way, with the right equipment. This was a challenge to his scientific ingenuity; the fact that there were many lives involved was immaterial. Dr. Tom Lawson had no great use for human beings, but he did respect the Universe. This was a private fight between him and It. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| aa51465 | Moon-Watcher and his companions had no recollection of what they had seen, after the crystal had ceased to cast its hypnotic spell over their minds and to experiment with their bodies. The next day, as they went out to forage, they passed it with scarcely a second thought; it was now part of the disregarded background of their lives. They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4bb9d13 | No electronic computer can match the human brain at associating apparently irrelevant facts. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d25751f | A hundred failures would not matter, when one single success could change the destiny of the world. | learning persistence success | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| db1b7cf | No single individual, however eccentric or brilliant, could affect the enormous inertia of a society that had remained virtually unchanged for over a billion years. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d4ed179 | Poole and Bowman had often humorously referred to themselves as caretakers or janitors aboard a ship that could really run itself. They would have been astonished, and more than a little indignant, to discover how much truth that jest contained. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 05acd23 | The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well stocked mind is safe from boredom. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| c4b62a3 | Discovery was no longer a happy ship. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 6385cbc | Atheism is unprovable, so uninteresting. However unlikely it is, we can never be certain that God once existed--and has now shot off to infinity, where no one can ever find him... Like Gautama Buddha, I take no position on this subject. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 07ce1e8 | Any man who had ever worked in a hardened missile site would have felt at home in Clavius. Here on the Moon were the same arts and hardware of underground living, and of protection against a hostile environment; but here they had been turned to the purposes of peace. After ten thousand years, Man had at last found something as exciting as war. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 215a98f | He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved. | humanity | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| 7fa06aa | The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e38f98e | On Columbus's later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood--until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity by forcing their heads underwater for long periods to see if the Spanish were, as gods should be, immortal. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 9b07f73 | Every novel is brand-new. It's never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it's merely the latest in a long line of narratives--not just novels, but narratives generally--since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other. | Thomas C. Foster | ||
| 55db6ca | What happens if the writer is good is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we can recognize elements of them from our prior reading. I suspect that a wholly original work, on.. | Thomas C. Foster | ||
| dfdd9fc | The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn't think Satan was involved. | Thomas C. Foster |