Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

Science holds our answer; knowledge—real knowledge, verifiable knowledge, not superstition, not religious nonsense—will be our salvation.

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

Sagan may not have believed in the God of the Bible, but he at least allowed the possibility of a creator.
Or did he? Carl was no more obliged to believe what he wrote in his sole work of fiction than George Lucas was required to believe in the Force.

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.

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

Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.

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

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 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.

The intelligent person must abhor violence.

Kyle was both deeply great and deeply flawed—peaks and valleys, more and less than she’d ever thought he was.
But, she realized, whatever he was now, she could accept it; the fit between them wasn’t ideal, and probably never would be. But she knew in her heart that it was better than it could be with anyone else. And perhaps acknowledging that was as good a definition of love as any.

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

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

“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.

But here’s the rub: equality doesn’t necessarily mean being the same. It’s possible to be different but equal. Yes, the male may be more ornate or more powerful in many cases, but the female controls mating, choosing the male, and also, of course, it is the female who brings new life into the world. Which is better? No one can say. Equal, but different.