Rudy Rucker Quotes

This provender was at a double remove from reality; it was artificially made food that had been further treated in an attempt to make it healthy.

Was I to be Earth's first casualty in the Attack of the Giant Ass From Hilbert Space?

My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist.

It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right.

Although my mood swings were the logical and deterministic results of my inputs, they were dismayingly hard for me to foresee, let alone control.

My roommate says anyone who mails bombs to computer scientists can’t be all bad.

Oh, yeah, she told me about that. I think mysticism’s a bunch of crap. All religions are a bunch of crap.

Will molecular manufacture give all of us the luxuries we want? No. Skewed inverse power-law distribution of valued qualities is an intrinsic property of the natural world. That is, roughly speaking, if there are a thousand people at the bottom of the heap, and a hundred immediately above them, there will only be ten farther up, and just one perched on the top in possession of a large proportion of the goodies. Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there's going to be something that we’re competing for—and most of us will feel as though we're getting screwed.

Even with omnividence and telepathy, I expect that, day in and day out, people won't actually change that much—not even in a million years. That's a lesson history teaches us. Yes, we've utterly changed our tech since the end of the Middle Ages, but the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel show that people back then were much like us, perennially entangled with the seven deadly sins.

There’s only one way that people change the past, Bela. They stop thinking about it. They move on.

The surest way to be unhappy is try to be happy all the time.

Don't you think women would like a man's head that always listens to them and agrees?

A person's lifeworm is a tangle of atomic worldlines. A braid. The dotty little atoms trace out smooth lines in spacetime: you are the pattern that these lines make up. there is no one single atom that is exclusively yours. I breathe an atom out, you breathe it in. Your garbage helps my tomatoes grow. And so the little spacetime threads weave us all together. The human race is a single vast tapestry, linked by our shared food and air. There are larger links as well: sperm, egg and umblilicus. Each family tree is an organic whole. Your spacetime body tapers back to the threads of mother's egg and father's sperm. And children, if you have them, are forever rooted in your flesh.

Anyone who’d volunteer for alien domination doesn’t really deserve to have his or her freedom.

Amazing, the respect that nuclear weapons bring.