Daniel Suarez Quotes

Technology. It is the physical manifestation of the human will. It began with simple tools. Then came the wheel, and on it goes to this very day. Civilizations rise and fall based on technological innovation. Bronze falls to iron. Iron falls to steel. Steel falls to gunpowder. Gunpowder falls to circuitry. Sobol looked toward the camera again. "For those among you who don't understand what's happening, let me explain: the Great Diffusion has begun—an era when the nation state dissolves. Technology will cause this. As countries compete for markets in the global economy, diffusion of high technology will accelerate. It will result in a diffusion of power. And diffusion of power will make countries an ineffective organizing principle. At first, marginal governments will fail. Larger states will not be equipped to intercede effectively. These lawless regions will become breeding grounds for international crime and terrorism. Threats to centralized authority will multiply. Centralized power will be defenseless against these distributed threats. You have already experienced the leading edge of this wave."

Yes, space will challenge us, have no doubt, but this is the very challenge humanity needs to cure us of our propensity for bullshit — because space is where bullshit goes to die. Out there only facts and competence keep you alive. Superstition, uneducated guesses, and comforting lies are what must go extinct. Not us.

Sorry. Just paralyzed by the indescribable beauty of the cosmos. We'll get to work.

You taught me everything I need to know; self-reliance, self-respect, community. Just don't be surprised if I actually put it to use.

Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.

...we know instantly whenever anyone touches our data—and who touched it. That’s the best one can hope for in a technologically advanced society.

The promise of eternal life is a threat unless you get to start over. The mythmakers knew that. They weren't dummies, man. … They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter—the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum—a mnemonic device. You couldn't fuck with the code or the rhymes didn't work; and if the rhymes didn't work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. Smell me?

Free people have a natural advantage on frontiers. Authoritarian subjects wait for permission, but free people take action and innovate. They can rapidly expand human presence in cislunar space — before totalitarian powers seize the L-points and hold them against us.

You never understood games. Maybe that's why the world was such a mystery to you.

the public doesn’t really decide anything now — they just select from the options they’re given.

My generation has no intention of living as serfs on a corporate manor, Dad. When people became more reliant on multinational corporations than on their own communities, they surrendered whatever say they had in their government. Corporations are growing stronger while democratic government becomes increasingly helpless.

And saving human civilization is how we remain indispensable. We cannot bomb our way to security in the twenty-first century. Instead, we must build — and in new domains.

They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

nodded. “I see that you’re a first-level Fighter. Which makes it all the more

So what? So what if everyone cares? What does that do for us? The situation we’re in isn’t going to be solved by angry posts and best fucking wishes. Public outrage has never stopped these bastards.