Venus was a machine for making bad weather. - Alastair Reynolds

I'm just saying...we can't trust them. We've never been able to trust them. That's always been a cornerstone of our operational policy." "Then maybe it's time we got a new cornerstone. They're people, Lillian. They might be people who make us uncomfortable, people with very different values from ours, but when we're facing local extinction at the hands of a genocidal machine intelligence, I don't think the differences between us look massively significant, do you?

Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.