Ian McDonald Quotes

At some point it will inevitably crash again: as weapons of mass destruction go, unrestricted market economies are among the more subtle but sure.

Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.

The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended.

The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime.

He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound.

Half your DNA's owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright.

Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years.

It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution.

Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress.

The words still don't move. The words don't need to move. It is you who is moved by them.

The laws of economics are subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our knowledge of the universe.

He has no belief—faith is beneath his dignity—but he enjoys the designed madness of religion.

She knew what she was now. She had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility, for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of liberties within herself.

His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather.

The elephants fight but the rats go about their business.