Vernor Vinge Quotes

All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge....And now revenge was all that life had left for him.

Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.

The old truths still hold: without a sustaining civilization, no isolated collection of ships and humans can rebuild the core of technology.

What do you do when your dream dies?

Every state religion he’d ever seen had a core of hypocrisy. That was why he’d been against bringing “Hrala” ashore—he knew the priests would never accept their theology suddenly incarnate.

I say, let’s learn more and then speculate.

Interesting problem, pain. So helpful, so obnoxious.

They’re very good at reaching nonsense conclusions from insufficient information.

So even in hell, there are clowns.

But see, your theory ‘explains’ all sorts of things without helping to do anything, much less providing tests for itself.

There may have been some time in the past when a group calling themselves astrologers could produce results. I don’t know, and the matter doesn’t interest me, for I live in the present. In our time the men working in the name of astrology are incapable of producing results, are conscious frauds.

The more you realized what the stars really were, the more you realized what the universe must really be.

Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years—and not one of them could come near to this!

Over the last twenty years, the worldwide net had come to be a midden of bogus sites and recursive fraudulence…telling truth from fantasy was often the hardest thing about using the web.

Civilizations rise and fall, but all technical civilizations know the greatest secrets now. They know which social mechanisms normally work, and which ones quickly fail. They know the means to postpone disaster and evade the most foolish catastrophes. They know that even so, each civilization must inevitably fall.