Stephen Baxter Quotes

You can observe for yourself the degradation of the air and water around us. The earth has a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of human industry, and with enough development, the planet could even be rendered uninhabitable.

It was a striking demonstration of how geomorphology, the shape of the landscape, dominates human geography.

The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.

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

Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.

For what goal is there for intelligent creatures, but to gather and store all available information?

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.

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

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.

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.

I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are!—and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution—forces which mold inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!

Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.

The last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star.
Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say.
The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.

There was no cognition he realized. There was only perception.

Paul closed his eyes, hoping to make the incomprehensible Universe disappear into the vacuum from which it had sprung.