Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

Afsan stood tall. “I am not afraid.”
“Fear is important, young one. Fear is the counselor. Those who don’t know when to fear wind up dead.”

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

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

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

Still, you must know that the fear of death is irrational; death comes to everyone.

Jag barked dismissively. “Philosophy,” he said. “Not science. They just want to believe that.”

“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.

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

The sad truth, Afsan, is that often what we intend has little to do with what we achieve.

“What arrogant fools we are!” said Jag. “Don’t you see?” To this day, despite all the humbling lessons the universe has already taught us, we still try to retain a central role in creation. We devise theories of cosmology that say the universe was destined to give rise to us, that it had to evolve life like us. Humans call it the anthropic principle, my people called it the aj-Waldahudigralt principle, but it’s all the same thing: the desperate, deep-rooted need to believe that we are significant, that we’re important.

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

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

Only a fool fights in a building that’s on fire.

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.

You know his dictum: nothing is anything unless it is something. That is, a concept without material reality is meaningless.