Liu Cixin Quotes

"If I’ve set your imagination going, I apologize."
“What do you think I should think about now?”
“In my experience, any thinking is liable to go off the rails. You should just go to sleep.

Your charge is to exploit and create environmental problems to make the population loathe science and modern industry.

But, in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness called social-pressure personality disorder. You should seek treatment.

If the entire history of the Earth were condensed into a single day, one hour would equate to 200 million years, one minute to 3.3 million years and one second to 55,000 years. Life would appear as early as eight or nine o'clock in the morning, but human civilisation would not emerge
until the last tenth of the last second of the day. From the morning that philosophers held the first ever debate on the steps of a temple in Ancient Greece... from the day slaves laid the first foundation stone of the Great Pyramid…… from the minute that Confucius welcomed his first disciple into the candlelit gloom of his thatched hut... right up until the moment you turned the first page of this book, only one tenth of the tick of the clock would have elapsed.

In the eternal night of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, two civilizations had swept through like two shooting stars, and the universe had remembered their light.

In this total information age, what is wealth? Ultimately, it’s no more than strands of pulses and magnetic marks inside computer storage... What is money? Money isn’t worth shit. Money is just a strand of electromagnetic marks even smaller than bacteria and pulses that disappear in a flash.

In this cosmic arena, Luo Ji faced not the fancy moves of Chinese sword fighting, resembling dance more than war; nor the flourishes of Western sword fighting, designed to show off the wielder’s skill; but the fatal blows of Japanese kenjutsu. Real Japanese sword fights often ended after a very brief struggle lasting no more than half a second to two seconds. By the time the swords had clashed but once, one side had already fallen in a pool of blood. But before this moment, the opponents stared at each other like statues, sometimes for as long as ten minutes. During this contest, the swordsman’s weapon wasn’t held by the hands, but by his heart. The heart-sword, transformed through the eyes into the gaze, stabbed into the depths of the enemy’s soul. The real winner was determined during this process: In the silence suspended between the two swordsmen, the blades of their spirits parried and stabbed as soundless claps of thunder. Before a single blow was struck, victory, defeat, life, and death had already been decided.

If a country can condemn its president on Main Street, that’s called democracy. However, if everyone disobeys their boss, then this country will collapse.

He was won over by their expressions, because he knew that the eyes of ordinary people were the best reflection of the level of civilization in a time and place.

Exploring the secrets of the universe is the basic instinct of all intelligent life.

Quantitative change eventually gives way to qualitative change.

That humans will biologically alter themselves is inevitable, which makes life sciences the most terrifying of the sciences.

It’s an interesting thing, really: The rigorous, science-based predictions of scientists and futurologists and the spirited “flights of fancy” of sci-fi writers are just about equally (in)accurate!

The products of modern science have already surpassed the wonders of magic.

The cosmos had not chosen humanity after all. In the old timeline, humans had created the apex civilization on earth, but that had been a one-time and accidental chance. In our human conceit, we’d taken the accidental for the inevitable.