Stephen Baxter Quotes

“So that’s that,” Miriam said. “We have a plan.”
“You have a shared delusion,” I said.

That's the trouble with living so damned long," Michael said. "Soured relationships last for ever.

One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet—at least up to our nineteenth century—the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep—it has sometimes seemed to me—capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher.
The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of “sacred” land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.

Emma trying to figure that for herself. But, like most probability problems, the answer was counterintuitive.

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

We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wonder is in fact infinite.

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

My fear was gone, to be replaced by a numbing sense of tedium: it is remarkable how rapidly the human mind can accommodate the most remarkable of changed circumstances.

In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.

The river of time flowed unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.

Everyone was used to official manipulation of the truth—to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went.

“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.

But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question.

If you were anywhere near the center of human affairs, even to the extent that she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws—territorialism, combativeness, reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view—looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.

If, in pursuing this object, we employ our skill in research, not in forming vain conjectures; and if data are to be found, on which Science may form just conclusions, we should not long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history of this Earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and not evidence, has decided. For in no subject is there naturally less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by prejudice, or misguided by false theory, have neglected to employ that light by which they should have seen the system of the world.