Stephen Baxter Quotes

There was a great wave of extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?

The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger.

Almost all of history was a carefully constructed mythology for use as propaganda or nation building.

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

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

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.

It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted.

To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes—information, ideas, fears, and hopes—spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed.
It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us.

I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils.

It seems to me that the human race simply isn’t advanced enough yet to be able to trust any subset of itself with the power to run the lives of the rest.

The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another.

Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own.

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.

It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far.
Maybe some things are more important than life itself.
But what?

All the tabloid-fed hysteria, the religious ravings, the pompous and hostile commentaries, made no sense, of course. If to abandon ten or a thousand sentient squid was a crime, so was abandoning one.
But when, she thought sourly, had sense and rationality been a predominant element in public debate on science and technology?