Stephen Baxter Quotes

It is of course a truism that all logically possible universes must exist.

Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.

Hunger," Hollerbach said. "The universal imperative.

There’s nothing an entrepreneur likes more than the sound of the word free.

Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.

Hutton became very critical of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt he wrote, ‘I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve themselves.’

Since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda.
NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships.

Let me face bare-handed a dozen highly trained and fully armed gladiators, each with a personal grudge against me, than a lawyer with a single pointed question.

You see, a species cannot survive for long if it continues to carry around the freight of antique motivations that you bear. No offense."
"None taken," I said drily.
"I mean, of course, territoriality, aggression, the violent settlement of disputes… Imperialist designs and the like become unimaginable when technology advances past a certain point.

Cause and Effect, when Time Machines are about, are rather awkward concepts.

The main reason to exercise, he thought: It stops your brain working, lets your body remind you you’re still an animal. It was the only respite he got from being himself.

There were other ways for primates to live, other kinds of societies that could be imagined. But once the pattern had been set, it was all but impossible to break.

“You know, in principle, why our world is as it is. Isn’t that sufficient? Is it really necessary for you to understand every detail?”
But if I don’t understand, Morrow thought sourly, then you can control me. Arbitrarily. And that’s what I find hard to accept.

The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.

Men thought of war—always the next one—as a great cleansing, as the last war that ever need to be fought. But it was not so, I could see now: men fought wars because of the legacy of the brute inside them, and any justification was a mere rationalization supplied by our oversized brains.