Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

Adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs, advertisers modify the truth.

It had to begin somewhere—maturity, the stage after the midlife crisis, peace. It had to begin somewhere.

There may be oodles of possible humans, but it is a finite number.

Free will is an illusion. It is synonymous with incomplete perception.

The fundamental of war has always been dehumanizing the enemy, seeing him as a soulless animal.

As one of my Jewish friends has been known to observe, the Jews who survived World War II were either now atheists or hadn’t been paying attention.

There are two opposing forces—the high mind and the low—but they reside in our brains, not various parts of our bodies. The high mind contains the conscious, the understood, the learned—that of which we are aware. The low mind consists of instincts and base impulses, of drives; it's the province of the subconscious. The struggle between high and low mind produces the personality."
"But surely the high mind is who we really are," said Afsan.
"No. The high mind may represent who we want to be, or who the church says we should be, but we are just as much our low minds as we are our high; the low mind shapes our behavior, too."

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I shook my head. "Have you ever noticed how many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities come at the end of a person's life? Count me out."

“And of me you ask which choice you should make?” said the translator’s voice.
“Yes,” I said.
There was the sound of rocks grinding, followed by a brief silence, and then: “The moral choice is obvious,” said the Wreed. “It always is.”
“And?” I said. “What is the moral choice?”
More sounds of rocks, then: “Morality cannot be handed down from an external source.” ... “It must come from within.”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
The Wreed wavered and vanished.

Children play with toy soldiers," said Keith, looking now at Jag. "Child races play with real ones. Maybe it's time all of us grew up a bit."

...but there, because there is no grace of God, go I.

I did learn one valuable lesson, though.
I learned that you can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.

He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.

I've never heard you talk like this before.
"We all change with the passing of the days."