James P. Hogan Quotes

What the Buddhists teach is to free yourself from the three great evils in life: greed — which means all kinds of craving — hatred, and delusion. But delusion is really the cause of the other two. We crave that which we delude ourselves into thinking will bring happiness; we hate those whom we delude ourselves into thinking stand to stop us from getting it.

Confidence is a feeling you get when you don't REALLY understand the situation.

We're so saturated with propaganda every way you look that we don't notice it. But when it isn't there, you notice.

It turns out that information leaks between universes at the quantum level. We think it accounts for all kinds of phenomena, from what drives evolution to strange insights and mystical experiences through the ages. The machine was built as an attempt to investigate and amplify them.

Linc didn't know if it was his imagination, but the streets seemed to have gotten older and dirtier - more so, surely, then was possible in the time that had gone by. What he remembered as the center of where the action was, and where all of life happened had turned into tired and shabby remnants of an age that was running down.

Had the store fronts always been so grubby with their cloudy windows, half hearted displays, the paint around the doors dulled and peeling like the once-high hopes of some forgotten opening day long ago? Had trash always stunk like this, piled in alleys and strewn along the gutters?

Above it all, high-rental buildings that had once thrust proudly toward the sky crumbled silently amid the winds, the rain, and the corrosive fames eating into them. They had degenerated into cheap hotels and apartments while business fled the cities for manicured office parks by the interstates.

But the people no longer stopped to gaze at these buildings, in any case. The figures on the sidewalks hurried on, avoiding each other's eyes, enwrapped in their own isolation.

Even those who stood or walked together aimed words at each other from behind facades that had become so second nature that even they themselves now mistook them for the persons atrophying within.

A city of brooding shells, inhabited by beings who hid inside shells.

"Esto es una selva donde nos despedazamos todos: sólo sobreviven los más fuertes y los débiles se destruyen".

-La Máquina Génesis.

People don't like seeing being afraid to express an opinion and seeing their neighbors dragged away to prison camps. You'd think that would be obvious enough, wouldn't you? But governments — here, anyway — have always seemed unable grasp it. That's what happens when you can't see further than short-term expediency.

Sometimes Hugh Brenner thought he'd been born on the wrong planet. It seemed as obvious as anything could be that people achieved more when they learned to get along than they did when they fought over things. If they put as much time and energy into fixing problems instead of blaming each other for being the problem, there wouldn't be any problems left. So far they'd had two full-dress rehearsals for wiping out what passed as civilization. This time it looked as if things might be leading up to the real performance.

Scientists don't frighten me. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore MISdirectable lines. It's children and conjurers who frighten me. Against scientists, I feel quite confident.

In many ways, communications networks are like road systems: their purpose is to move traffic quickly from one place to another with minimum congestion. They therefore present similar problems to their designers. Speed is important, of course, and so is safety, which means essentially the same in communications as it does on highways: what arrives at a destination should bear as close a resemblance as possible to whatever left the departure point.

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion.

I am confident that the things that have been described for centuries as mystical insight are results of abnormal Multiverse sensitivity — either acquired accidentally or developed through training. There is that much in common. The difference is in the direction that consciousness looks in — the part of the Multiverse from which information enters awareness. In the traditional meditative state, the mind expands into the present. Its experience is of knowing — direct perception of a timeless reality that transcends the limited world of the senses. The QUADAR, by contrast, tunes to the future. It delivers an experience of feelings and premonitions. One reveals what is; the other, what could be. Actuality versus potential.

"I can tap George at the deli. He owes me — "

Linc waved the rest aside with a shake of his head and peeled a fifty off a roll he produced from his belt.

"Say, are you sure? . . ."
But his father was already reaching for it. "I'll have it back for you by — "

"It doesn't matter. Keep it," Linc said curtly.

And he left before the taste in his mouth could get any worse.

Bad luck could happen to anybody, and anyone might be in need of a helping hand one day. But to have no pride. That was something else..

Gregg Caldwell has a method that he uses sometimes when he has to make a difficult decision quickly: forget the issue itself and consider the alternatives; if none of them is acceptable, the decision is made.

The fact that some religious fanatics might support a theory doesn't invalidate it, anymore than the concurrence of UFO abduction cults invalidates the notion of extra-terrestrial life.