Daniel Suarez Quotes

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.

But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce.

Which is why human society mostly works; people avoid trouble. But behind every law is the implicit threat of force, and behind every vote is the implicit threat of rebellion. That's the bargain that holds a free society together. And no society with a wide power imbalance remains free for very long.

to understand a people, you need to wade into their culture. It’s culture that tells their tale. And music is culture.

Her new boss was an undead automaton from hell, true, but no job was perfect.

When privacy is criminalized,
only criminals will have privacy.

Anything before you’re thirty-five is new and exciting, and anything after that is proof the world’s going to hell.

When people become 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.

A hundred stories each and draped in vines, the dozen towers resembled overgrown postapocalyptic ruins — except for their glittering organometallic lights. Acre for acre, the towers produced ten times the food of a traditional farm on just a fraction of the water. Zero pesticides. Almost entirely automated.

She recalled scoffing at Morris’s three golden rules of computer security: do not own a computer;
do not power it on;
and do not use one The subtlety of it had escaped her at the time. It wasn’t meant as a surrender. It was a meditation on risk versus benefit. Did these systems give us more than they took from us? It was an admission that we will never be fully secure. We must instead strive for survivability.

"daemon (dēm n) — A computer program that runs continuously in the background and performs specified operations at predefined times or in response to certain events. Condensed from "Disk and Execution MONitor

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."

Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too — but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees.

"Great. So if a dragon and a fairy show up at the castle, what the hell am I supposed to do with that information? Put out a warrant for their arrest?" "No,"

Innovation was a curious thing. It never failed to amaze him.

And yet this place confirmed what they’d long known: that truly disruptive innovation rarely came from the expected sources. 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.

No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.