Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

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

'Justice,' he said, his breath coming out raggedly as he quoted another Nobel laureate—at that precise moment, he couldn't remember which one—'is always delayed and finally done only by mistake.'

You are spoiled by being a sociologist, Lansing. In the hard sciences, we occasionally have to face the reality that some of our theories will actually be disproven.

“Good luck—and God protect.” I was sure that little reference to God was for the sake of the network cameras. Ching-Mei was an atheist. She only had faith in empirical data, in experimental results.

“But you get along with humans now, which is something my people are having trouble managing. How do you do it?”
Longbottle barked, “Accept their weaknesses, welcome their strengths.”
Jag was silent.

And Canadians didn’t like guns, either—they had no Second Amendment, or whatever damned thing it was that made Americans think they could go around armed.

He cursed himself for thinking anything this complex would end up not being a source of problems.

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."

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

It turned out that big-bucks science had been a purely mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, starting with the Manhattan Project and ending with the fall of the Soviet Union.

He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.

God," he said under his breath.
"All the gods," replied Jag, softly, "are a very, very long way from here.

Nothing is anything unless it is something. In other words, a concept without material reality is meaningless.

I do remember her favorite expression: the Lord works in mysterious ways.
Perhaps so. But I found it hard to believe he would work in shoddy, haphazard ones.

Must God be defined in a way that places him or her beyond the scope of science?
I’d always believed that there was nothing beyond the scope of science.
And I still believe that.
Where do you draw the line?
Right here. For me, the answer was right here.
How do you define God?
Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.