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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2b4469f | But you invite ..." "I invite a bit of military nonsense." "That's what I ..." "Duncan, I am a teacher. Remember that. By repetition, I impress the lesson." "What lesson?" "The ultimately suicidal nature of military foolishness." | pacifism | Frank Herbert | |
| 39a0f3f | The premise of Ezequiel Morsella's PRISM model7,8 is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict--the impulse to withdraw one's hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you'll die if you act on that impulse--was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides .. | Peter Watts | ||
| 5f9f45e | Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic ar.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 5e46ecd | I have been a stranger in a strange land, Halleck quoted. Paul stared at him, recognizing the quotation from the O.C. Bible, wondering: Does Gurney, too, wish an end to devious plots? | Frank Herbert | ||
| 23f0411 | Don't sit with your back to any doors. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 62bbde3 | Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite. | religion science-fiction | Frank Herbert | |
| 5aafa3f | Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. --LAW AND GOVERNANCE THE SPACING GUILD MANUAL W | Frank Herbert | ||
| a30a5a0 | He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed. | discernment perspective prophecy | Frank Herbert | |
| 38bf005 | You must learn to rule. It's something none of your ancestors learned. | leadership | Frank Herbert | |
| dd906f8 | You don't see much of any path unless you are Janus, looking simultaneously backward and forward. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 93a852c | To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 9b32798 | Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it. | ethics existentialism meaning-of-life mythology prophecy religion science-fiction | Frank Herbert | |
| 5479026 | To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen. -- The Amtal Rule | Frank Herbert | ||
| 6a4cbd5 | What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death. | control interpretaions law serenity | Frank Herbert | |
| 7168b17 | Every religious, business and governmental question has the single derivative: 'Who will exercise the power?' Alliances, combines, complexes, they all chase mirages unless they go for the power. All else is nonsense, as most thinking beings come to realize. | Frank Herbert | ||
| c51fae1 | It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 7a0231f | Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 671d60a | Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. | know-it-alls masculinity | Neal Stephenson | |
| 57cec5f | It wasn't just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you. A | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7afa44a | Banks used to issue their own currencies. You can see these old banknotes in the Smithsonian. 'First National Bank of South Bumfuck will remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,' or whatever. That had to stop because commerce became nonlocal--you needed to be able to take your money with you when you went out West, or whatever." "But if we're online, the whole world is local," Randy says." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9d0f961 | The universe was a disorderly mess, the only interesting bits being the organised anomalies. Hackworth had once taken his family out rowing on the pond in the park, and the ends of the yellow oars spun off compact vortices, and Fiona, who had taught herself the physics of liquids through numerous experimental beverage spills and in the bathtub, demanded an explanation for these holes in water. She leaned over the gunwale, Gwendolyn holding .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e5da708 | We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4628265 | One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5891bc9 | She just didn't think it decent to live in a place where there were no coffee shops to have breakfast in when she woke up, | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8864002 | The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. | humor inspirational math ocean | Neal Stephenson | |
| a6b72f2 | What, not coins in the bank? Does your purse hang as flaccid as a gelding's scrotum? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3773a33 | The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S Navy flashlight. In the sotto voce one might use to correct an enourmous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanic lucifer is of such a superior design as to make any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone concerned. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 519c1fa | Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b9da574 | Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2247c9a | Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a hangover | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 81543dd | Richard's ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn't enjoy that last cigarette. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 73e00cb | Later, he was to decide that Andrew's life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a84d71e | Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| bb935bb | There are always fuckups, and there is always a goat. Sometimes the goat is you. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| eccab12 | The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people--and this is true whether or not they are well-educated--is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations--in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e2facd4 | Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 19b65da | No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They hav.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8431fba | The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money." "I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there." "There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators." | particle-accelerators science | Neal Stephenson | |
| 8014e6d | boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals--something | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 68cff04 | But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president's head. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f32f2e6 | The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world." "And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8a13a0f | Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f8bd2c7 | I made it into Wikipedia," sang Erszebet. "I'll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4032d13 | You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you, as well as consequential psychological and possibly, depending on your personal belief system, spiritual risks ensuing from your personal reaction to said physical risk. Any movement on your part constitutes an implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk," the first MetaCop says. There .. | funny police | Neal Stephenson |