Vernor Vinge Quotes

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

There had been an era of ubiquitous law enforcement, and some kind of distributed terror.

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind—but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for. From this era on, I think invention will be the parent of necessity—and not the other way around.

“We think the governance has opted for ubiquitous law enforcement.”
Pham whistled softly. Now every embedded computing system, down to a child’s rattle, was a governance utility. It was the most extreme form of social control ever invented. “So now they have to run everything.” The notion was terribly seductive to the authoritarian mind.

Funny how the least attempt at deception always seems to make life more complicated.

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.

So much technology, so little talent.

Interesting problem, pain. So helpful, so obnoxious.

What do you do when your dream dies?

The closer a Citizen came to the centers of power, the more of a madhouse the universe became.

Technical people don’t make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

I have come to kill you."
The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try.

If during the last thousand seconds you have received any High-Beyond-protocol packets from "Arbitration Arts," discard them at once. If they have been processed, then the processing site and all locally netted sites must be physically destroyed at once. We realize that this means the destruction of solar systems, but consider the alternative. You are under Transcendent attack.

Viki was awed by all the incredible quackery. Daddy thought such things were amusing—“like religion but not so deadly.”