John Barnes Quotes

Experimentally she thinks about dumping toxic waste in pristine wilderness and killing the last great apes on earth with a club. She still finds both those thoughts disgusting. This is a relief; it seems to her that she’s just selfish, not evil.
She was always taught they’re the same thing. She hopes she remembers, when she gets out of all this, that they’re not.

It's a good idea for diplomats to keep their word in small matters. It makes the later complete betrayals more of a surprise.

The way you can tell there’s democracy going on is that nothing gets done.

Once I’m dead, I can afford to be patient.

Work does not cause money; getting paid causes money.

The drive to see what’s over the next hill is in part the fear that one may never know, that if one doesn’t go over the hill today, one may never get farther than the village graveyard.

Other people say that their parents are the same way whenever there’s bad news from whatever patch of dirt they came from, but being common still doesn’t mean it makes any sense. After all, it was twenty years ago, and if the adults were going to get so upset about having everything smashed up, they shouldn’t have had a war or tolerated AIDS for so long that they gave it the chance to turn into mutAIDS, or allowed the climate disequilibration to get so far out of hand. Honestly, they remind me of the three-year-olds in the nursery, smashing things to bits and then crying because they’re broken. I certainly hope I’m not that kind of a moron when I’m that old.

You thought you could treat me the way you did everybody else and beat me up for being smarter than you. Because you’ve always been the big king of the class, haven’t you, Your Majesty? Well, you’re not anymore. You were never anything but the plain old class bully, and now you’re the ex-bully. And the only reason people are bullies is because they’re stupid.

Writing about yourself is addictive. I hope all you kids noticed that. If you feel like autobiography, try heroin. Lots safer and easier to control…

There’s just no fight left in her; that’s what happens when you really believe in something, and find out that it was never true.

Almost every culture in the Thousand Cultures had some wisdom literature, and much of it was the same between any two cultures. . . . Cultures tend to be alike in much of what they think are the basic virtues, but one of the ones they are most alike in, though it rarely appears in their book of wisdom, is: Distrust strangers, fear foreigners, dread novelty.

Too bad about all those people, but as Hassan says, compassion speaks well of its holder but does little for its recipient.

Brains don’t exactly run in that family—they sort of dribble slowly away.

And just like this, all of a sudden, your people and mine will begin to talk?" "It only looks sudden from some places. Running off a cliff is sudden if you don't know it's there, even if you have been running toward it for days." "That's not a reassuring metaphor." "It isn't meant to be.

The only thing Carla has ever learned to like about dealing with power is how easy it is to embarrass people who have it.