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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| af2974f | Machine idiolect. It doesn't matter how sophisticated they get, they still end up sounding like a playgroup learning box. I sighed and looked directly ahead at the slice-of-virtual-life holos on the wall. "You want out, now'd be a good time to tell me." "I do not want out, Takeshi Kovacs. I merely wished to acquaint you with the considerations involved in this course of action." "Okay. I'm acquainted." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 5d4910d | I already have a doctorate in conflict investment. I don't really need the gifted-amateur reading list. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| ed3eb0d | Living offworld seems to trigger some stubborn aspect of our capacity for superstition; it's like we need our monsters and our hero saviors a lot more when we're under alien skies. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| a9783a3 | You'd think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar system with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 5adb666 | You'd think they'd develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You'd think they wouldn't fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn't deploy weaponry that would render the theater of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 2a31116 | On Harlan's World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you're not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn't register until it's not there any more. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| a9ca7ff | The sunglasses were jammed on a nose you could have opened cans on. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 5068efe | Yukio was angry because he was. Because he was an asshole male with delusions of status just like Dad, just like the rest of them, and I'd humiliated him in front of Plex and Tanaseda. Because he was an asshole male just like the rest of them, in fact, and rage was the default setting. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| a116b41 | Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armory when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| f3812e5 | Like so much of what goes on in the Gash, the overall aim is consumer tranquillity, not truth. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| f8e1ef7 | Planetary colonization is invariably a destructive process, and advanced technology hasn't done much more than sanitize that process so that humans are guaranteed their customary position on top of whatever ecosystem they are raping. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| f14b0b7 | I imagine they're pretty much insane by now. Can't be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you're fighting tooth and nail for your life in a mud pit. I doubt there's much conscious human mind left.' Vidaura looked down into her lap. 'Is that what you tell yourself?' 'No, it's just a theory.' I shrugged. 'Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is some conscious mind left. Maybe there's a lo.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b7e08a7 | The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterwards. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b27e5ca | He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.' 'Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he's unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.' She flinched. 'You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not--' 'Four.' I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. 'I'm talking about four isolated incidents. And that's just this year. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 34ea3af | Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn't cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died of." "Which is what?" Yavuz shrugged. "Fear." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 2dedf1c | See, once upon a time," Yavuz was saying, "fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That's the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can't live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge's terms a non-adaptive trait." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| f95f88f | Lies are a precious currency--you have to be careful how and where you spend them. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 383817d | They'd spit in your eye and walk away if you called them victims, but somehow that same grit never found its way into any built form better than hardscrabble endurance and nonspecific rage. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 0d4044f | They tell you to save the ship at all costs. No one ever talks about whether the passengers and crew deserve all that effort. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| da5a13a | You know what you stupid fucking conspiracy assholes just don't get? No one is that well organized. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 1caab3f | She sounded like sex for its own heated sake, like death in a good cause, like clarity of purpose without the dragging, piled-up weight of a million dirty little compromises along the way... | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| d029315 | There isn't actually any escape. Once you understand this, you are empowered. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 8690ca7 | Got a brother served up at the Dhashara pass, he always did say you lot let your women run riot. Mouthing off like they were men, riding horses, carrying weapons, shit like that." "Been known to happen," Egar agreed. "Yeah, well, that shit won't wash down here. This is Yhelteth, this is the Empire. We're civilized. Women know their place. And truth is, I'm about fucking sick of the trouble we get from your kind coming in here." Grudging, bi.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| aacc02c | To recommend change, as this report does, is not to suggest that the problems we address will disappear or no longer require attention. At most they will disappear from view, and this may very well be a counterproductive outcome, since it cannot fail to encourage a complacency we can ill-afford. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 473fbe9 | These days, one of them told me one freezing slow-as-Sunday night, we're all just feeding off the stored fat of a dream gone bad. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b4cbeb0 | The police are more impressive by night. First of all, you've got the flashing lights casting dramatic color into everyone's faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| cefd991 | It's always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse. | political philosophy-of-life | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 9d14159 | It's not parole." The corps' deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapor-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. "You know what I went down for?" | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 2212b30 | His companions stared at me like frightened children as I came down the stairs, like I'd come down to them on Pachamama's Own Ladder to the Firmament--some dark spirit too tarnished and twisted with sin to make it through, barred at the top by divine Inti's doormen, found corrupt and wanting, and thrown back down from paradise among the stars. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 46f5e71 | But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anemone, cut up on a surgical platter, about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be resleeved, Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months, Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged whit.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 8a54cae | Fact remains--launch determines orbit, and Torres got a launch in life that put him low and in decay from the start. You just give it time and watch the sky. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b5c25b8 | It'll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that's always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can't get by on past models, you have to keep moving forward, building better minds and bodies. Either that or the universe moves in like a swamp panther and eats you alive. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| cc239c5 | The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimeters, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the color ended like a mask under the eyes, and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b940a44 | Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode. But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 6d53700 | Half the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living room wall." She paused. "And it's probably upside down." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 3dae9bf | But then that's humans for you--never can trust the stroppy fuckers to live up to the stereotypes you assign. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 67d5907 | Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumour, is a far greater power. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| ee1f610 | Anyway, it's a crock of shit. Simple-minded post-quranic desert Islam propaganda. No one in the modern Muslim world with two brain cells to rub together believes that shit any more. And who wants a fucking virgin anyway? You got to teach them every fucking thing. Like having sex with a fucking shop mannequin with its motion circuits shot up. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4b98497 | It is not our enemies that defeat us. It is our fear. Do not be afraid of the monsters, Miss Elizabeth. Make them afraid of you. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b7b3d0a | Like all lotteries, it was an attempt to distract and dilute labor force discontent with irrational hope. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4932614 | They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 26c8a6f | Served up through the id-feeding Technicolor TV drip that passed for national news coverage, he was just new dosage in a regime already 150 years screen-ingrained. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 421e2a1 | Residual biosystems glitches, they said, and told me it'd fade with time. I believed them, because in the end almost everything does. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4aa69cf | Which part of get the fuck out didn't you understand, hard man?" I got the fuck out." | Richard K. Morgan |