1
2
3
4
5
6
8
10
13
14
15
16
17
18
21
26
31
33
42
51
53
58
63
66
67
71
74
76
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5ea1fc0 | I'm not going to dress in velvet robes with ermine trim when I'm spending the day hanging pictures and cleaning out the attic in the South Tower, no matter how much Willin would like it," Mendanbar said firmly." | king mendanbar | Patricia C. Wrede | |
| 1fc7021 | Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them. | death existence | Philip C. Plait | |
| 46513e6 | Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects. | centralization economics free-market taxation | James C. Scott | |
| 4441342 | We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory. | James C. Scott | ||
| c9e858a | The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations. | James C. Scott | ||
| fbbe3b9 | New World escape crops made the economics of escape as tempting as its politics. Colonial officials tended to stigmatize cassava and maize as crops of lazy natives whose main aim was to shirk work. In the New World, too, those whose job it was to drive the population into wage labor or onto the plantation deplored crops that allowed a free peasantry to maintain its autonomy. Hacienda owners in Central America claimed that with cassava, all .. | James C. Scott | ||
| 5cc82e9 | Nothing could be further from the truth. All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all of them. Quite often such identities, particularly minority identities, are at first imagined by powerful states, as the Han imagined the Miao, the British colonists imagined the Karen and the Shan, the French the Jarai. Whether invented or imposed, such identities select, more or les.. | James C. Scott | ||
| d609019 | Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and | C. G. Jung | ||
| a20ef13 | Worse, Lee felt isolated. In Texas he skipped meals with others to avoid "uninteresting men," wishing he was back by his campfire on the plains eating his meals alone.211 He avoided sharing quarters and found that he "would infinitely prefer my tent to my-self."212 In a group he felt more alone than out on the prairie, and that "my pleasure is derived from my own thoughts." -- | american-civil-war-biography confederate-army robert-e-lee union-army | William C. Davis | |
| 297969f | Both men lost speech in their last days and hours. Both died at age sixty-three, Lee long since weary of life, and Grant ready to live it again. Their war made them national icons, and their war reputations dictated the balance of their lives, careers, and posterity. | american-civil-war-biography confederate-army robert-e-lee union-army | William C. Davis | |
| 00e38dc | Otto would pull the trigger at the slightest provocation and you, Michael, would agonize aver its morality even if your life were threatened. I'm the tiebreaker. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 571fe17 | But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called "spirit." And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 3630a42 | A major part of his job was deciding when warnings could be ignored, when they could be dealt with at leisure--and when they had to be treated as real emergencies. If he paid equal attention to all the ship's cries for help, he would never get anything done. He | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 6f36397 | Here the trees surrounded them with an invisible, anechoic blanket, so that every word seemed sucked into silence the moment it was uttered. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 1cbeccc | This hydrogen was under such enormous pressure that it had become a metal. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 6f6a7ec | The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a diamond as big as the Earth. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 639e0c6 | This touch of luxury was typical of the Base, though it was sometimes hard to explain its necessity to the folk back on Earth. Every man and woman in Clavius had cost a hundred thousand dollars in training and transport and housing; it was worth a little extra to maintain their peace of mind. This was not art for art's sake, but art for the sake of sanity. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 0bddab3 | There was no objection when he said: "I'm going after it." Nor did he expect there to be; his life was now his own, to do with as he pleased. He" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 100751c | Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands--no, by now millions--of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there's a ninety-nine percent overlap, the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing .. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 755380c | Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| ddfd206 | He's a creature of today--not haunted by the past or fearful of the future! | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 2416fbc | Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That's why you need a captain. You can't run a ship by a committee--at least not all the time. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e05bada | Now that so many of its psychological problems had been removed, humanity was far saner and less irrational. And what earlier ages would have called vice was now no more than eccentricity--or, at the worst, bad manners. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| cc3d8b9 | One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life--a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin. | future nostalgia space time | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| 6f8cb6e | It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4ea5c67 | They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of absolute omnipotence; | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| f1710e2 | This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purpose of the Universe was the production of intelligence, and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astronomical phenomena, 'Mere dead matter' was one of their favourite phrases. | biology dead exobiology intelligence matter universe | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| c55455b | Suppose, in their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man? | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| f132f18 | Civilization and Religion are incompatible" and "Faith is believing what you know isn't true." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| f69f892 | electronic diplomacy was not possible over solar-system distances. Some elder statesmen, accustomed to the instantaneous communications that Earth had long taken for granted, had never reconciled themselves to the fact that radio waves took minutes, or even hours, to journey across the gulfs between the planets. "Can't you scientists do something about it?" they had been heard to complain bitterly when told that immediate face-to-face conve.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e354583 | When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 197c5aa | an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: "Wormholes in space." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| ca45643 | Jealousy is a terrible thing. "It doth mock the meat it feeds upon" is an understatement. Jealousy is completely consuming, totally irrational, and absolutely debilitating. The most wonderful people in the world are nothing but raging animals when trapped in the throes of jealousy." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| fcae478 | Naturally, the system would have to be rigidly closed, recycling all food, air, and other expendables. But, of course, that's just how the Earth operates--on a slightly larger scale. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 01e936c | Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 330ddef | In a rare flash of humor, she had replied: "Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| cd5792d | You can't have action without reaction. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4cb0f2f | Many scientists flatly denied the possibility. They pointed out that Discovery, the fastest ship ever designed, would take twenty thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri -- and millions of years to travel any appreciable distance across the Galaxy. Even if, during the centuries to come, propulsion systems improved out of all recognition, in the end they would meet the impassable barrier of the speed of light, which no material object could e.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 52fa19d | Like every human being, Alvin was in some measure a machine, his actions predetermined by his inheritance. That did not alter his need for understanding and sympathy, nor did it render him immune to loneliness or frustration. To his own people, he was so unaccountable a creature that they sometimes forgot that he still shared their emotions. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4210563 | if it really was brilliant I'd have thought of it already. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 7368d2a | Enjoy them while you may," answered Rashaverak gently. "They will not be yours for long." It was advice that might have been given to any parent in any age: but now it contained a threat and a terror it had never held before." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 1b627d3 | The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials--these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| a747889 | The fax machine now allows us to exchange ideas almost in real time; it's far more convenient than the Electronic Mail | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| dcc3cae | Floyd made it a rule never to worry about events over which he could have absolutely no control; any external threat would reveal itself in due time and must be dealt with then. But he could not help wondering if they had done | Arthur C. Clarke |