Ken MacLeod Quotes

Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least.

It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee.

"What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible? We're fucked, that's what." – "The Falling Rate of Profit, Red Hordes and Green Slime: What the Fall Revolution Books Are About" - Nova Express, Volume 6, Spring/Summer 2001, pp 19-21.

When you’d lived long enough, she’d sometimes reflected, when certain habits had become ingrained no matter what refreshment of the neural pathways the immortality genes could bestow, ethics and etiquette became ever less distinct. Hitherto the involuntary equation had read one way, in disproportionate pangs of conscience over a small breach of manners. Now the terms had been inverted, and she felt over the Council majority’s horrible, criminal, potentially murderous mistake the sort of acute embarrassment that might have been appropriate for some ghastly faux pas. Dreadfully sorry, I’m such a ditz about these nuclear attack protocols...

(8 hours after the Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster)

It’s a big coincidence. It’s something we can’t explain. But as far as we know that’s all it is. And if it isn’t, we’ll only find out by discovering more facts, not speculating, no matter how logical that speculation might seem. The way to learn the world is to look at the world.

If you, dear reader, are looking a this across some great gulf of time and increase of knowledge, spare me your condescension. You too were young once, and ignorant once, and from a future standpoint—perhaps your own—you are young and ignorant still.

"The uploads replicate and develop relationships. Most of them go very bad. You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God." – Newton's Wake

We're in danger of losing the ship generation.
"I'm aware of the problems," she said. "'You can't tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.' Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer."

She knew about these asteroids, of course. It was because she had classified them in the wrong mental category that she hadn’t thought of them.

Darvin listened to the hymn with a mixture of enjoyment of its beauty and disdain of its content.

The cover pirated the pictures on the Southern pamphlet and headlined a story whose title, “Invasion from Infinity!,” bore witness to a brash disdain of doing right as much as of blithe contempt for having been proved wrong.

All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?

'Naive' is not a word I associate with the Southern Rule. Superstitious, perhaps, traditional, yes, maddeningly set in their way, certainly—but not naive.
"I meant you are naive. They must have a hidden motive."
"This is why I have no politics," said Darvin. "I can't think in those terms."

"… a faded black T-shirt with a soaring penguin and the slogan 'Where do you want to come from today?'" – Newton's Wake