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Stephen Baxter
150 quotes
“So that’s that,” Miriam said. “We have a plan.” “You have a shared delusion,” I said.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all project our petty lives upon the universe.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The secret of a Scientist is not what he knows. It’s what he asks.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The essential condition for life is the existence of sharp energy gradients.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hunger,” Hollerbach said. “The universal imperative.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Self-doubt is part of being human...but the main thing is to get on with the business of survival.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level...A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a ploy, Jaar. I was trying to manipulate you, to get you to fight, to make you do what I wanted you to do.” “I know that.” He smiled. “Of course I know that. But the motives behind your words don’t reduce their truth. Don’t you see that?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s the trouble with living so damned long,” Michael said. “Soured relationships last for ever.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human consciousness was an artificial thing. Once humans had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles in the guise of humans. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Michael saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide. He, the last man, need no longer cling to such outmoded comforts. There was no cognition, he realized. There was only perception.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bzya touched his shoulder. “But that’s why you and I are here, old man. To keep the world away from boys like Farr and Cris—to give them a place that seems as stable and eternal as your parents did when you were a child—until they are old enough to cope with the truth.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But Parz was better than nothing: it offered stability, regulation, a framework to live in. People gripe about their tithes—and nobody’s going to pretend that the Committee gets it right all the time—but most of us would prefer taxes to living wild. With all respect to you, my friend.” He bit into his cake. “And that’s still true today; as true as it ever was.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’re a damn fool, boy. I want you to know that now, in case I don’t get a chance to tell you later.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, in principle, why our world is as it is. Isn’t that sufficient? Is it really necessary for you to understand every detail?” But if I don’t understand, Morrow thought sourly, then you can control me. Arbitrarily. And that’s what I find hard to accept.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Try to remember this lesson. It might keep you alive a little longer. The most precious thing to a human being is a mind-set: more precious than one’s own life, even. Human history has taught us that lesson time and again, with its endless parade of wars—human sacrifices en masse—thousands of deaths over the most trivial of differences of religious interpretation.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No,” Morrow said. “I can’t accept that. I don’t always agree with the Planners. But they aren’t killers.” “You think not?” Uvarov laughed again. “The survivalists—your ‘Planners’—are psychotic. Of course. As I am. And you. We are a fundamentally flawed species. Most of humanity, for most of its history, has been driven by a series of mass psychotic delusions. The labels changed, but the nature of the delusions barely varied...”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But that’s insane,” Morrow protested. Uvarov hissed, “No one ever said it wasn’t. We’re human beings. What do you expect?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Understanding is the key to turning anything from a threat into an opportunity.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Empty. Barren. These were the true conditions of the Universe, she thought; life, and variety, and energy, were isolated aberrations.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just process. Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe it’s time we humans abandoned our species-specific chauvinism—our petty outrage that the Universe has unfolded in a way that doesn’t suit us.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The river of time flowed unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time stretches like a lazy leopard when it wants to.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve made myself a rich man. You shouldn’t assume that makes me a fool.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Paul closed his eyes, hoping to make the incomprehensible Universe disappear into the vacuum from which it had sprung.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was no cognition he realized. There was only perception.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star. Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say. The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are!—and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution—forces which mold inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My fear was gone, to be replaced by a numbing sense of tedium: it is remarkable how rapidly the human mind can accommodate the most remarkable of changed circumstances.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always been distrustful of personal power—for I have met not one man wise enough to be entrusted with it.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men thought of war—always the next one—as a great cleansing, as the last war that ever need to be fought. But it was not so, I could see now: men fought wars because of the legacy of the brute inside them, and any justification was a mere rationalization supplied by our oversized brains.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For what goal is there for intelligent creatures, but to gather and store all available information?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cause and Effect, when Time Machines are about, are rather awkward concepts.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a striking demonstration of how geomorphology, the shape of the landscape, dominates human geography.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can observe for yourself the degradation of the air and water around us. The earth has a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of human industry, and with enough development, the planet could even be rendered uninhabitable.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No. You are wrong. These structures are alive.” “What?” “By any reasonable definition of the word. They can reproduce themselves. They can manipulate the external world, creating local conditions of increased order. They have internal states which can change independently of external inputs; they have memories which can be accessed at will…All these are characteristics of Life, and Mind.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You see, a species cannot survive for long if it continues to carry around the freight of antique motivations that you bear. No offense.” “None taken,” I said drily. “I mean, of course, territoriality, aggression, the violent settlement of disputes… Imperialist designs and the like become unimaginable when technology advances past a certain point.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Information—its gathering, interpretation and storage—is the ultimate goal of all intelligent life.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s nothing an entrepreneur likes more than the sound of the word free.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Malenfant had moved his corporation here, out of New York, five years ago. A good place for business, he said. God bless Nevada. Distract the marks with gambling toys and virtual titties while you pick their pockets.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world. We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible; try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet; try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working toward exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice. I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space. Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known—in fact diminishing—stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich; others get poor. But it’s not even a zero-sum game; in the long term we are all losers.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source