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Stephen Baxter
150 quotes
“Emma trying to figure that for herself. But, like most probability problems, the answer was counterintuitive.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t believe this for a second,” Emma said flatly. “It is impossible to prove, but hard to refute,” said Cornelius.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This remains a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had use them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everyone employed.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness studded by lost-looking little towns.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only advantage of e-therapists,” Maura murmured, “is that their horseshit is cheaper than humans’.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the tabloid-fed hysteria, the religious ravings, the pompous and hostile commentaries, made no sense, of course. If to abandon ten or a thousand sentient squid was a crime, so was abandoning one. But when, she thought sourly, had sense and rationality been a predominant element in public debate on science and technology?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far. Maybe some things are more important than life itself. But what?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda. NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems to me that the human race simply isn’t advanced enough yet to be able to trust any subset of itself with the power to run the lives of the rest.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes—information, ideas, fears, and hopes—spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed. It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone was used to official manipulation of the truth—to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is of course a truism that all logically possible universes must exist.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Have you studied history, Anna?” “Yes. The information is limited, the interpretation is partial. But it is interesting.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Almost all of history was a carefully constructed mythology for use as propaganda or nation building.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a great wave of extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, the world may be heading for the iceberg, but the dead hand of old Darwin is still on the tiller. What am I talking about? Just this: if most people stop breeding, the handful of people who love kids and want to have them—people like me—are, within a generation or two, going to outnumber everyone else. Simple math. And that’s exactly what is happening.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maura pulled an elaborate face. “Don’t these people realize the cat is already out of the bag? You can’t control the public’s access to information anymore—and you certainly can’t control their response. Nor should you try, in my opinion.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She wondered if the gerontocrats—conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive—were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change—new fashions, gadgetry, terminology—but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After a time it became unbearable, the lesson blinding in its cruelty: but if the universe didn’t get you, other sentient beings would.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The shortness of human lives, she thought. Our curse. Every generation thinks it is immortal, that it has been born into a world that has never changed, and will never change.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She laughed. “Guilt: the Catholic Church’s first patent.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He dug into the ground until he came up with a stone the size of his thumbnail. “—if the universe was the size of this rock, then each star would be the size of a quark.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life, Cassiopeia said, was emergent everywhere. Planets were the crucible. Life curdled, took hold, evolved, in every nook and cranny it could find in the great nursery that was the Galaxy.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When everybody else was snuggling at the drive-in, you used to lecture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. But is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The main reason to exercise, he thought: It stops your brain working, lets your body remind you you’re still an animal. It was the only respite he got from being himself.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They talked further, an incoherent conversation of disconnected fragments, peppered by misunderstanding, suffused by mistrust.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wonder is in fact infinite.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No wonder you can’t figure out the Fermi Paradox, Malenfant, if you don’t know your own wife’s dress size.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this? Well they wouldn’t be satisfied with the generosity of Candyland. They’d breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated. Then would come the famines and the wars.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lion takes only the last deer in the herd. She does not dream of having so many cubs that the plains would be full of nothing but lions. There are simple laws. Most species figure them out; you are the exception. An ecology of a single species is not viable. A diverse, stable world would provide for you.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They see the universe as essentially bountiful, a generous motherland. We see the universe as an enemy nation, to be occupied and mastered.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He walks on, across the hot crimson dust.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bex shrugged. “You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source