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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 135d12e | I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done. | death decadence immortality longevity progress | Isaac Asimov | |
| cdc3b9d | And Mallow laughed joyously. "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion. "But we,--we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic r.. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| ad010d7 | The colonization of space is the only possible salvation of Earth. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 37083f3 | Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 06687c5 | Changelessness is decay." "A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse." "Changelessness is a change for the worse" | kelden-amadiro robots science-fiction vasilia-aliena | Isaac Asimov | |
| b53d62d | The religion we have is our all-important instrument towards that end. With it we have brought the Four Kingdoms under our control, even at the moment when they would have crushed us. It is the most potent device known with which to control men and worlds. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 9aca90a | He was going mad and knew it, and somewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight off the hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and know that you were going mad -- to know that in a little minute you would be here physically and yet all the real essence would be dead and drowned in the black madness. For this was the Dark -- the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| d07e6d7 | Feet, for tens of thousands of years, had clogged and shuffled in the mud - and held down the minds which, for an equal time, had been fit for the companionship of the stars. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 369a785 | The Library was outmoded and archaic--it had been so even in Ebling Mis's time--but that was all to the good. Pelorat always rubbed his hands with excitement when he thought of an old and outmoded Library. The older and the more outmoded, the more likely it was to have what he needed. In his dreams, he would enter the Library and ask in breathless alarm, 'Has the Library been modernized? Have you thrown out the old tapes and computerization.. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| d7d29aa | Surely, if we take on thinking partners--or, at the least, thinking servants--in the form of machines, we will be more comfortable with them, and will relate to them more easily, if they are shaped like humans. It will be easier to be friends with human-shaped robots than with specialized machines of unrecognizable shape. And I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, .. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| fde3737 | Complaining about the universe's unfairness is never part of a successful strategy. | Amanda Palmer Neil Gaiman Cory Doctorow | ||
| 818bb36 | This sounds like you're saying that national security is more important than the Constitution. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| bfc7ea6 | What you've got to understand, son," says the doctor, "is it's all the fault of the alien space bats." -- | paranoia | Cory Doctorow | |
| d15b407 | The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?" | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 4cd81bb | That's why you never hear politicians talking about 'citizens,' it's all 'taxpayers,' as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care. Zottas cooked the process so they get all the money and own the political process, pay as much or as little tax as they want. Sure, they pay most .. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 930e96e | So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| d0faff2 | What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read? | reading | Cory Doctorow | |
| 7e9e668 | s security expert Bruce Schneier has said, "Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet." | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 000fbff | Once upon a time, my government turned my city into a police state, kidnapped me, and tortured me. When I got free, I decided that the problem wasn't the system, but who was running it. Bad guys had gotten into places of high office. We needed good apples. I worked my butt off to get people to vote for good apples. We had elections. We installed the kind of apples everyone agreed would be the kind of apples we could be proud of. They said g.. | change dignity freedom good-apples police-state | Cory Doctorow | |
| eff7791 | I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to? | Cory Doctorow | ||
| e1555b1 | What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning! | computers funny humor humour lightning terrorism umbrellas | Cory Doctorow | |
| 16086c3 | Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 2e4379b | It's good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building--it's hive-mind [stuff:]. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's brainwashing! | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 14934f3 | Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It's like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit. | economics evolution | Cory Doctorow | |
| 6a2a535 | And that's the real reason the powerful fear open systems and networks. If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in the world, using the net, then we can all communicate with the same ease that's standard for the high and mighty. [...] And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without the boss's permission, then, brother, look out, because the Coase cost of demanding.. | labour-movement | Cory Doctorow | |
| df135bf | If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around. If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech - not censorship - then you have a dog in the fight. If you believe in.. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 1894358 | We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming--TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK! | Cory Doctorow | ||
| fa998ae | One single supporter remained faithful to him: an old paralytic, Lord Albermarle. The noble lord, confined to his armchair, would have given his whole fortune to be able to travel around the world, in ten years even; and he bet four thousand pounds on Phileas Fogg. | Jules Verne | ||
| b6384e3 | There is the disadvantage of not knowing all languages," said Conseil, "or the disadvantage of not having one universal language." | Jules Verne | ||
| e66167b | Sir," replied the commander, "I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus." | Jules Verne | ||
| 02216c2 | One friend is always sacrificed to the other in friendship. | Jules Verne | ||
| f7ccb35 | Whereas, once under way, you can get so far that going forwards is the only choice. | Jules Verne | ||
| 60cce91 | Phileas Fogg, having shut the door of his house at half-past eleven, and having put his right foot before his left five hundred and seventy-five times, and his left foot before his right five hundred and seventy-six times, reached the Reform Club | mechanical walking | Jules Verne | |
| 619a0b6 | If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy. | Tony Judt | ||
| 2554bf2 | Familiarity reduces insecurity, so we feel more comfortable describing and combating the risks we think we understand: terrorists, immigrants, job loss or crime. But the true sources of insecurity in decades to come will be those that most of us cannot define: dramatic climate change and its social and environmental effects; imperial decline and its attendant 'small wars'; collective political impotence in the face of distant upheavals with.. | Tony Judt | ||
| 48d53d3 | As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover. The Thinker can think about virtually anything. (...) The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. To cite a notorious example which unleashed incredible horrors earlier in this century, if the Thinker thinks that all Jews are rich, the Prover will pro.. | Robert Anton Wilson | ||
| 2b33714 | I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our own time, to concentrate on Sartre. His hesitations, retractations, inconsistencies, all proceed from his consciousness of the problems: how do novelistic differ from existential fictions? How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped account of the world? How can one control, and how make profitable, the diss.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 74d8242 | A work of grace in the soul makes itself known either to the one who has it or to onlookers. "Where" | John Bunyan | ||
| 4f14d90 | I stopped being watchful and diligent. I rushed after my own lusts. I sinned against the light of the Word and the goodness of God. I have grieved the Spirit, and He is gone. I tempted the Devil, and he has come to me. I have provoked God to anger, and He has left me. I have so hardened my heart that I cannot repent." Then" | John Bunyan | ||
| 7bc97ef | You came in by yourselves, without His direction, and will go out by yourselves, without His mercy." To" | John Bunyan | ||
| bb1e0ee | when you talk of your journey and of what you have heard and seen, you inwardly desire your own glory in all you do and say." "All" | John Bunyan | ||
| 81f44e4 | Indeed, to know is something that pleases talkers and boasters, but to do is that which pleases God. Not | John Bunyan | ||
| 785a479 | We have a mutual friend, see, and she- Ah, screw it. This is Gideon. When would it be convenient for you to die? | Bryan Lee O'Malley | ||
| e4636c7 | The whole message of the Christian scripture is based in the idea of metanoia, the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face. Even a cursory knowledge of history reveals that Christianity is a religion about change. The Christian faith always changes--even when some of its adherents claim that it does not. | Diana Butler Bass |