Top 15 John Barnes Quotes

One of the stranger beliefs in science fiction is a passionate belief in Beautiful Writing--lots and lots of extraspecial exciting words thrown no hurled no CASCADED upon the reader in a shimmering shower of precious verbal gleaming gleanings and a singing pillar of righteous fiery syntactic spinach. The only thing that was good in that sentence was the spinach, and the hell with it.

Human beings always say they prefer peace, but it takes a saint to talk us into not assaulting our neighbors.

There is a saying among those of us who have careers with the Council of Humanity that skiers, cooks, painters, and diplomats must work with what is in front of them.

In discussing the existence, or not, of the soul: "I am Caledon. Quite a few of my fellow Caledons still believe there is some essence to a human being, something that makes a person unique." "And you don't." "I don't. I see that people who believe in anything beyond plain physical reality are mainly engaged in making themselves or others miserable."

If you want to learn a culture, you have to learn how to like what it likes, rather than go looking for something that you like.

Shan had always said that in any multiple choice about human motivation, the real answer was always "all of the above."

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.

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.

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

Finally she resorts to the oldest tactic of all, telling the truth.

With diligent effort he has established that there is no statistical basis for Murphy’s Law. He has also established that he believes in it anyway.

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.

The beautiful earth is being crapped up by an excess of people—lovely as individuals, towns, and cultures, but hideous in such profusion.

One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them...these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension—between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see—is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain—or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create?—are the ones found in the world around us.

He’s always known the real way to money is not through production but through control; “The hotel owner gets rich owning the keys, the maids stay poor keeping the toilets clean,” as one of his biz profs back at Madison used to say.