Adam Roberts Quotes

Have you never seen human beings acting in a mob-frenzy? Have you never seen a religious rite that tipped people over the edge? Did you not see footage of the rock-and-roll music concerts they have in America?

Come out," Sukarno cried into the vegetation. "I have a gun!"
"Mr. Sukarno," said Iago, without looking at him. "You are, if you don't mind me saying, too fond of shouting 'I have a gun.'

As far as dreams were concerned—well dreams are generated by the random processes of neural oscillation during the brain’s rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There’s nothing special about that. It’s not the dreams that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in the mind make of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for solving problems—that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are highly adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility.

One of the curiosities of anger, of course, is that the more you focus it outward, firing it at the injustices of the world, the more it actually parses your own self-pity and resentment.

By all means let us consult your needs! So long as they overlap precisely with my needs, I’m sure we can accommodate them.

I shouldn't be naive" Diana said. "Of course, realising its destructive power only makes them want it more. Of course. Even more than great wealth, power craves technologies of destruction. Good to be wealthy, but better to remain in power—and the more awe-inspiring the weaponry at your disposal, the better able you are to do that.

That a human being had died did not distress her. Had it been somebody she knew it would have upset her; she wasn’t a monster. Had it been somebody she cared about. But it was nobody she knew, and it would have been disingenuous to pretend that the death of somebody she didn’t know affected her on an emotional level.

You're just doing that to pass the time," said Davide, dismissively.
"Just to pass the time," agreed Jac. "Though I suppose time will pass, in any case, regardless of what I do.

It had to be one or the other. Did it have to be one or the other? Even the question as to whether it had to be one or the other had to be one or the other!

There is always war," said Dakkar, coldly. "There will always be war, whilst empires oppress and distort human potential.

I have heard the rumours," said the captain, directing his attention to the food on his plate.
"Ah, but rumours," said Lebret easily, "may not be trusted. Appearances, you see, can trump reality.

She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.

People-problems did not interest her. Data seemed to her a larger, purer, more transcendent quantity than Homo sapiensness. Human-to-human interactions were, effectively, all just politics, and politics bored her.

The future cannot be won with the weapons of the past," insisted Dakkar. "To rise up like Spartacus will only lead to millions of ordinary people being crucified, and the Caesars—and Czars—retaining an even tighter grip on power. No, no, the future must be won for justice and equality with the weapons of the future.

Billiard-Fannon’s expression hardened. “Say the words,” he ordered. “Say them, or displease me. You do not wish to see the displeasure of the Holy One!”
“I do not wish to see the Holy One at all,” said Jhutti.