All Quotes

"“Continuous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are social economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on.” His listeners nodded unhappily. “So everything is expanding. But it can’t happen in contradiction to the law of conservation of matter-energy. No matter how efficient your throughput is, you can’t get an output larger than the input.”"

"One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism—how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model."

"In the random flux of universal contingency, nothing mattered; and yet, and yet..."

"But nothing lasts, not even stone, not even despair."

"It was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one’s emotional equanimity, even sanity itself."

"But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. So, okay, there was no such thing as cultural polyploidy. There was just a determinate historical situation, the consequence of all that had come before—the decisions made, the results spreading out over the planet in complete disarray, evolving, or one should say developing, without a plan. Planless. In that regard there was a similarity between history and evolution, both of them being matters of contingency and accident, as well as patterns of development. But the differences, particularly in time scales, were so gross as to make that similarity nothing more than analogy again. No, better to concentrate on homologies, those structural similarities that indicated actual physical relationships, that really explained something. This of course took one back into science."

"No step along the way had seemed more than a little thing; but altogether it came to something rather monstrous."

"It was a real science; it had discovered there among the contingency and disorder, some valid general principles of evolution—development, adaptation, complexification, and many more specific principles as well, confirmed by the various subdisciplines. What he needed were similar principles influencing human history. The little reading he did in historiography was not encouraging; it was either a sad imitation of the scientific method, or art pure and simple. About every decade a new historical explanation revised all that had come before, but clearly revisionism held pleasures that had nothing to do with the actual justice of the case being made."

"Of course he had seen that human affairs were irrational and unexplainable. This no one could miss. But he realized now that he had been making the assumption that the people who involved themselves in governance were making a good-faith effort to run things in a rational manner, with a view to the long-term well-being of humanity and its biophysical support system. Desmond laughed at him as he tried to express this, and irritably he exclaimed, “But why else take on such compromised work, if not to that end?” “Power,” Desmond said. “Power and gain.” “Ah.” Sax had always been so uninterested in those things that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it."

"“Bah. Irrelevant. Physical reality is clearly not a factor in these calculations.” “Well put.” Sax shook his head, frustrated. “Religion again. Or ideology. What was it Frank used to say? An imaginary relationship to a real situation?”"

"Rituals should have some unpleasantness, or you don’t appreciate them properly."

"One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable."

"“It’s the same old story,” he said bitterly. “The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”"

"What we need is equality without conformity."

"“Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on. “Art is an idiot,” Maya replied."

"Revolution has to be rethought. Look, even when revolutions have been successful, they have caused so much destruction and hatred that there is always some kind of horrible backlash. It’s inherent in the method. If you choose violence, then you create enemies who will resist you forever. And ruthless men become your revolutionary leaders, so when the war is over they’re in power, and likely to be as bad as what they replaced."

"I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support."

"Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point by point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their slaves."

"We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need."

"In the next meeting they were arguing about the limits to tolerance, the things that simply wouldn’t be allowed no matter what religious meaning anyone gave them, and someone shouted, “Tell that to the Muslims!”"

"Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them."

"When she realized what she was doing she snorted in disgust, at herself and at the pervasiveness of politics—how it could infect everything if you let it."

"Anyone can agree that things should be fair, and the world just. The way to get there is always the real problem."

"Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality."

"You conceive of science as nothing more than answers to questions? As a system for generating answers. And what is the purpose of that? ...To know. And what will you do with your knowledge? ...Find out more. But why? I don’t know. It’s the way I am."

"If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change."

"Conspiracy theory was tremendously popular, always and forever. People wanted such catastrophes to mean something more than mere individual madness, and so the hunt was on."

"Every generation is its own secret society."

"“We could have a contest. Who does Jackie listen to least?” Maya laughed out loud. “Everyone would win.”"

"He made a face. “Arguments, speculation—conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”"

"Michael was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around."

"Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy."

"It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power."

"“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him. “Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere."

"Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics."

"Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining."

"Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique."

"But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science."

"Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before."

"They’re lucky they can’t read each other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each other—they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad."

"“It’s kind of scary,” Art remarked to Nadia. “Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.” “Always.”"

"People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture—that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it."

"“Please don’t ask stupid questions,” he said. “Sunnis are fighting Shiites—Lebanon is devastated—the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states—the North African countries are a metanat—Syria and Iraq hate each other—Iraq and Egypt hate each other—we all hate the Iranians, except for the Shiites—and we all hate Israel, of course, and the Palestinians too—and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouins from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?"

"Je suis toujours athée, gràce á Dieu."

"After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up."

"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."

"Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself."

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

"“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped governments from doing what they wanted to do?”"

"No one could complain about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing nostalgia for a heroic age that had not actually been heroic—or, along with heroic, had also been suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No, Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia—the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in resistance but in expression."