Nancy Kress

"I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and mañana that is business in South America."

"The real thing—that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not what did. Reality doesn’t make good theater."

"Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home."

"She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself."

"Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech."

"And wasn’t that a common pattern in human history! Greedy religious orders, wanting to keep power for themselves, using customs and myth and threats and murder to keep the people in line and then making them believe it was all for their own good so they wouldn’t challenge the supremacy of the priesthood. Some political thinker of a few centuries ago had nailed it exactly: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”"

"Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as cultural relativism."

"How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?"

"A conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking."

"But it would be anecdotal evidence only, undocumentable and, by definition, unrepeatable. Therefore, not science."

"An enormous amount of behavior grows out of genetic imperatives."

"He introduced Marbet as “project psychologist.” “I don’t believe in psychology,” Capelo said flatly. Marbet remain unruffled. “Even that based on physiology?” “If it’s based on chemistry, with replicable results from control experiments, then of course I believe in it. That’s science. Literary theories about the mind are not.” “Ah,” Marbet said. “Fairy tales, all. From Uncle Droselmeyer Freud to Lady Godiva Jennings, undressing some poor sap’s mind ‘consciousness layer’ by ‘consciousness layer.’ All for a large amount of money, of course.”"

"Do you always interfere in other people’s confrontations? Are you that most dangerous of all people, a peace-at-any-price meddler?"

"That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing."

"When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing."

"In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one."

"Every single war ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifying deebee programs. All it took were contacts and money."

"Amanda decided that if these people were God’s choice for instruments, then God was as crazy as Father Emil."

"She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness."

"Science should remain above politics, if it’s to do its job."

"By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair. But he’d always known that was true of the universe."

"Kaufman’s fault. He had not planned, had not seen far enough ahead. Failure of vision was a sin the universe did not forgive."

"History isn’t morality."

"It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it."