We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology. - Kim Stanley Robinson

You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.

And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking—an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

Tourism is an ugly business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting parasites.