Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

I believe in the possibility for real human connections in virtual spaces. I also believe that the virtual version of yourself might very well be the best and truest version of yourself...We don’t have to necessarily be the worst versions of ourselves behind the mask of an avatar, though it often seems as if we are. People think we have it all figured out in certain ways, but in fact we’re just babies and toddlers when it comes to all these issues. We haven’t figured out exactly the best way to be good citizens, good humans online yet, and that’s OK. Because all these things are really young.

There's no difference between one's killing
and making decisions that will send others to kill.
It's exactly the same thing, or even worse.

I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. Can we not make the transition from automated aerospace killing to automated aerospace exploration of the solar system in which we live?

Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair.

Wizards die the same as other men, once you cut their heads off.

Now some people say, "Well, if there's virtual particles there it's really not nothing," but there are no real particles. You try and measure things there, there's nothing, but those virtual particles can give space energy and in fact we've discovered to our great surprise—it won the Nobel prize two years ago—that empty space has energy, and if you put energy in empty space, then it's really strange because it's not like the normal energy... it's not gravitationally attractive, it's actually repulsive, and we've discovered the expansion of the universe is not slowing down like any sensible universe should do. It's actually speeding up... because it's dominated by the energy of empty space.

Whether you live to be 50 or 100 makes no difference, if you made no difference in the world.

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

The Virtual Reality is yes the continuation of reality, but sometimes you can no longer understand what you are talking about in a pink, yellow or green thing, it is so devitalized.

LSD trips and the space flights of the astronauts are comparable in many respects. Both enterprises require very careful preparations, as far as measures for safety as well as objectives are concerned, in order to minimize dangers and to derive the most valuable results possible. The astronauts cannot remain in space nor the LSD experimenters in transcendental spheres, they have to return to earth and everyday reality, where the newly acquired experiences must be evaluated.

Virtual reality is a fairly new concept to us; but once you grok it, it seems clear that any civilization that was capable of starflight and longevity extension, and so forth and so on, would also have a full VR toolkit under control. Well then, that means that when we go looking for the extraterrestrial, what will be the footprint? Perhaps vanished races are all around us, but downloaded into solid-state matrices that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize that possibility.

Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds.

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.