Greg Bear Quotes

The future seemed not just dangerous, not just bleak; it seemed incomprehensible.

Whom could I blame?
Ultimately, one man who had started a strangely secular church, attracting people good and bad, faithful and cynical, starting an organization too large and too well-financed and organized to simply fade: promulgating a series of lies become sacred truths. How often had that happened in human history, and how many had suffered and died?

The sorrow never dies; it is merely nacred by time.

He wondered for a moment if they had stumbled onto something truly supernatural but dismissed that with a disgusted shudder.

I sometimes think we deserve to die, we’re all so goddamned stupid.

Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her.

We have arisen as the result of purely natural processes; one of the great achievements of modern science has been the elimination of God or others teleologisms him as a necessity from our explanations.

Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization...

Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don’t understand everything.

The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound—that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self. We are all aliens to each other, all different and divided. We are even aliens to ourselves at different stages of our lives. Do any of us remember precisely what it was like to be a baby?

6. “That’s insane,” Lanier said.
“No very. It’s politics.”

Alienation without must be accompanied by alienation within; that is the law for every social level, even individuals. To harm one’s fellows, even one’s enemies, harms you, takes away some essential element from your self-respect and self-image.

To fight an enemy properly, you have to know what they are. Ignorance is defeat.

“Maybe you administrators can work it all out in the council.”
You administrators. That put us in our place. Paper pushers, bureaucrats, politicians. Cut the politics. We were the ones who stood in the way of the scientist’s goal of unrestrained research and intellection.

3. “I’m going to take you out tonight,” he said. “Another Heisenberg dinner.”
“What’s that?”
“Uncertainty,” Edward said crisply. “We know where we are going, but not what we are going to eat. Or vice versa.”
“Sounds wonderful. Which car?”
“The Quantum, of course.”
“Oh, Lord. We just had the speedometer fixed.”
“And the steering went out?”
“Shh! It’s still working. We’re cheating.”