Adam Roberts Quotes

But once we are free...once we have evolved beyond the old medieval power structures and the medieval internecine violence they create, then we’ll be able to use the technology responsibly. Everything depends on that.

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

“Eva is perfectly content with her academic research,” said Diana. “She just isn’t interested in power. As I say those sentences,” she added, clasping her knees to her chest, “I can tell they’re both wrong. Aren’t they? Of course she’s interested in power.”
“She’s a human being,” agreed Iago.

Nobody can overthrow the fascist dictator by being nicer than him. The reason for this is: by definition everybody is always already nicer than the fascist dictator.

Individually speaking, death is always a rupture, a violence. But taking a total view, death is the bell curve upon which the cosmos is balanced. Without it, nothing would work, everything would collapse, clogged and stagnant. Death is flow. It is the necessary lubrication of universal motion. It is, in itself, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.

Death is the currency of power.

It could be any one of a dozen things. Experience has taught me that we much more often see connection where there is only random copresence. Pattern-seeking consciousness, you know. Great plains ape, you know.

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!

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.'

So it ends
As it begins.
Off we climb
And no one wins.

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.

It's not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy."
"We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love," said her two MOHmies, as one. "That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good."...
"If we are powerful," sang her MOHmies, "we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.

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.

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.

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