Dennis E. Taylor Quotes

That is what I think it is, right?” [Based on what we can detect, it appears to be the beginning of a Dyson Sphere] Ah-yep. Truly astounding.

Retired just means I don’t have a job description, and I can work on what I want now.

There wasn’t exactly a booming movie industry, of course. Vulcan was very much a frontier planet, and the economy was still bootstrapping through the basic requirements. We’d be another couple of decades before leisure activities became a major market segment.

Stereotypes are valid first-order approximations.

We — by which I mean the people working on the project, including myself — are not scared of you, Bob. We’re scared of the tactical nuke buried in the basement.” If I’d still had eyebrows, they would have shot right off my head. “Habba-whaaa?

She was right, of course, but what was the point of being a curmudgeon if you couldn’t curmudge?

FAITH is all about nice, easily packaged black-and-white answers. Even if they’re factually wrong.

All actions have risks. Most inactions even more so.

At one time, we thought that the way life came together was almost completely random, only needing an energy gradient to get going. But as we’ve moved into the information age, we’ve come to realize that life is more about information than energy. Fire has most of the characteristics of life. It eats, it grows, it reproduces. But fire retains no information. It doesn’t learn; it doesn’t adapt. The five millionth fire started by lightning will behave just like the first. But the five hundredth bacterial division will not be like the first one, especially if there is environmental pressure. That’s DNA. And RNA. That’s life. … Dr. Steven Carlisle, from the Convention panel Exploring the Galaxy

"Um. Ways in which a sentence beginning with the word "missiles" could be a good thing... Nope. I got nuthin'."

Typical politician. Never use ten words when a thousand will do.

Some problems simply do not yield to reductionist techniques, particularly those that are dependent on emergent phenomena.

I eyed the rafters until I spotted a good location — not big enough to hide something valuable, therefore unlikely to be of interest to a burglar. I placed my hand in front of my face, palm down, and opened my mouth. A one-inch roamer marched out onto the back of my hand. If anyone was watching, that would probably give them nightmares for life.

Now, the big one. Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the metric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk of meat. Bob was a person, and a person was a history, a set of desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions. Bob was the accumulation of all that Bob had been for thirty-one years. The meat was dead, but the things that made Bob different from a chipmunk were alive. In me. I am Bob. Or at least, I am the important parts that made Bob.

Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. … Sun Tzu, Art of War