Stephen Baxter Quotes

The only advantage of e-therapists," Maura murmured, "is that their horseshit is cheaper than humans'.

In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.

From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness studded by lost-looking little towns.

This remains a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had use them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everyone employed.

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.

“I don’t believe this for a second,” Emma said flatly.
“It is impossible to prove, but hard to refute,” said Cornelius.

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

But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space.
Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known—in fact diminishing—stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich; others get poor. But it’s not even a zero-sum game; in the long term we are all losers.

It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible; try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet; try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working toward exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice.
I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now.

I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world.
We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come.

Malenfant had moved his corporation here, out of New York, five years ago. A good place for business, he said. God bless Nevada. Distract the marks with gambling toys and virtual titties while you pick their pockets.

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

Information—its gathering, interpretation and storage—is the ultimate goal of all intelligent life.

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.

“No. You are wrong. These structures are alive.”
“What?”
“By any reasonable definition of the word. They can reproduce themselves. They can manipulate the external world, creating local conditions of increased order. They have internal states which can change independently of external inputs; they have memories which can be accessed at will…All these are characteristics of Life, and Mind.