Stephen Baxter Quotes

If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.

A growing belief that behind every event lay intention—be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky—was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even the right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.

Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion.

I have always been distrustful of personal power—for I have met not one man wise enough to be entrusted with it.

We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.

You aren't doing much for morale, Sidewise."
Sidewise shot back, "And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what's blindingly obvious all around us.

After a time it became unbearable, the lesson blinding in its cruelty: but if the universe didn’t get you, other sentient beings would.

The essential condition for life is the existence of sharp energy gradients.

But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this?
Well they wouldn’t be satisfied with the generosity of Candyland. They’d breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated.
Then would come the famines and the wars.

Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.

Have you studied history, Anna?"
"Yes. The information is limited, the interpretation is partial. But it is interesting.

But Parz was better than nothing: it offered stability, regulation, a framework to live in. People gripe about their tithes—and nobody's going to pretend that the Committee gets it right all the time—but most of us would prefer taxes to living wild. With all respect to you, my friend." He bit into his cake. "And that's still true today; as true as it ever was.

The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.

They see the universe as essentially bountiful, a generous motherland. We see the universe as an enemy nation, to be occupied and mastered.

She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old.