Adam Roberts Quotes

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.'

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.

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?

Let us not entirely abandon Occam’s Razor! The possible, no matter how unlikely, is always to be preferred to the impossible, however appealing.

Are we in a dream?" Lebret asked. "Might we actually be dead and in some afterlife?"
"How could we test either supposition?" the scientist asked, with characteristic practical-mindedness. "What conceivable experiment could we design to falsify such a claim?

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.

His last hours alive. But he didn’t know!
None of us will know, of course. The weird grammar of death. You die, he or she dies, they die, but there is no genuine form for “I”. Not really. All know that, none know when.

She thought of the multitude.
Trillions of human beings, wrappend like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better han being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precariously and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water—this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. Thery should be helped, not exploited.

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.

Do you know what this is?
"The floor, Miss?"
"Dust! I read about it—tiny particles of matter.

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.

“Do not,” Dakkar barked, “juxtapose yourself and myself in any sentence your mouth may form!

Death is the currency of power.

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.

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.