Greg Bear Quotes

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

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.

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?

I felt myself growing older. I didn’t see it as an improvement.

That’s what politics is all about—coercion and lies.

“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.

We were innocent and did not know that the price of freedom—of individuality—is attention to politics, careful planning, careful organization; philosophy is no more a barrier against political disaster than it is against plague.

There may be no such thing as prescience, but honed instincts are crucial in our game.

Here was a creed without a coherent philosophy—a system without a sensible metaphysic. Here was puerile hypothesis and even outright fantasy masquerading as revealed the truth.

Some believe a superior being has guided humans. I see no compelling evidence for this. The human wish for guidance, for confirmation and external support, is an underlying theme in all they do and say, however. Very few stray far from this most fundamental of wishes: that they might have immortal and omniscient parents.

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

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.

You can find nearly anything human in Los Angeles, good and bad. I don’t think it would be workable as a city without mental therapy.

9. “From what we’ve been told, he wasn’t very humble, was he, Mr. Lascal?”
Lascal shook his head. “I don’t know many writers who are.”

What he liked he despised for being likable.