Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.
The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—
You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.
Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly.
It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.
Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since
You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.
Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.
Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape
In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.
It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.
The invisible hand never picks up the check.
It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.
What kind of Dv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.
A lot of scientists act on their beliefs and so do things that look crazy to the rest of us.
When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, “Where are all my friends?
It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.
