Nancy Kress Quotes

Every single war ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifying deebee programs. All it took were contacts and money.

The real thing—that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not what did. Reality doesn’t make good theater.

It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it.

How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?

Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as cultural relativism.

She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness.

She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself.

And wasn’t that a common pattern in human history! Greedy religious orders, wanting to keep power for themselves, using customs and myth and threats and murder to keep the people in line and then making them believe it was all for their own good so they wouldn’t challenge the supremacy of the priesthood. Some political thinker of a few centuries ago had nailed it exactly: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”

A conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking.

Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home.

That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing.

I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and mañana that is business in South America.

History isn’t morality.

In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one.

Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech.