Jews From The United States

"Maia recognized a look of true religion in the other woman’s eyes. A version and interpretation that conveniently justified what had already been decided."

"The heritage we give our children, and the myths we leave to sustain them, must work with the tug and press of life, or they will fail. Adaptability has to be enshrined alongside stability, or the ghost of Darwin will surely come back to haunt us, whispering in our ears the penalty of conceit. We wish our descendants happiness. But over time one criterion alone will judge our efforts. Survival."

"What hope has any endeavor which is based on hate and fear?"

"Piss on the world, or it’ll piss on you."

"Loneliness, her arch enemy, never seemed content."

"One great mystery is why sexual reproduction became dominant for higher life-forms. Optimization theory says it should be otherwise. Take a fish or lizard, ideally suited to her environment, with just the right internal chemistry, agility, camouflage—whatever it takes to be healthy, fecund, and successful in her world. Despite all this, she cannot pass on her perfect characteristics. After sex, her offspring will be jumbles, getting only half of their program from her and half their re-sorted genes somewhere else. Sex inevitably ruins perfection. Parthenogenesis would seem to work better—at least theoretically. In simple, static environments, well-adapted lizards who produce duplicate daughters are known to have advantages over those using sex. Yet, few complex animals are known to perform self-cloning. And those species exist in ancient, stable deserts, always in close company with a related sexual species. Sex has flourished because environments are seldom static. Climate, competition, parasites—all make for shifting conditions. What was ideal in one generation may be fatal the next. With variability, your offspring get a fighting chance. Even in desperate times, one or more of them may have what it takes to meet new challenges and thrive. Each style has its advantages, then. Cloning offers stability and preservation of excellence. Sex gives adaptability to changing times. In nature it is usually one or the other. Only lowly creatures such as aphids have the option of switching back and forth."

"We are programmed to find sex pleasurable for one simple reason—because animals who mate have offspring. Those who do not mate have none. Traits that result in successful reproduction get reinforced and passed on. Evolution is that simple. It is therefore useless to bemoan as evil the fact that men tend toward aggression. Among our ancestors, aggression often helped males have more offspring than their competitors. “Good” and “evil” had little to do with it. That is, until we reached consciousness, at which point, good and evil became pertinent indeed! Behaviors which might be excusable in dumb beasts can seem perverted, criminal, when performed by thinking beings. Just because a trait is “natural” does not oblige us to keep it."

"You can’t fight biology. Only push at the rules, here and there."

"There was that word quaint again. It seemed to refer patronizingly to anything simple or backward, from the viewpoint of a city-bred tourist."

"Maia lifted her gaze to watch low clouds briefly occult a brightly speckled, placid sea, its green shoals aflicker with silver schools of fish and the flapping shadows of hovering swoop-birds. The variegated colors were lush, voluptuous. Mixing with scents carried by the moist, heavy wind, they made a stew for the senses, spiced with fecund exudates of life. The beauty was heavy-handed, adamantly consoling. She got the point—that life goes on."

"It could be worse. I can’t think how right now, but I’m sure it could be worse."

"At her station in life, wisdom dictated keeping a low profile. And yet..."

"Intelligence is loose in the galaxy. Power is in our hands, for better or worse. We can modify Nature’s rules, if we dare, but we cannot ignore her lessons."

"Some smart moves were little more than nicely padded traps."

"Beware of assumptions that seem “obvious” in one decade. They may become quaint in the next."

"History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate."

"The man talked, but somehow nothing he said seemed to make any sense."

"It also became clear why the nations were expected to commence major space enterprises. Henceforth, the raw materials for industrial civilization were to be taken from Earth’s lifeless sisters, not the mother world. All mines currently being gouged through Terra’s crust were to be phased out within a generation and no new ones started. Henceforth, Earth must be preserved for the real treasures—its species—and man would have to look elsewhere for mere baubles like gold or platinum or iron."

"Nelson replayed his last musings to himself, and silently laughed. Listen to you! Jen was right. You're a born philosopher. In other words, full of shit."

"Look at all the happiest, sanest people you've known, Nelson. Really listen to them. I bet you'll find they don’t fear a little inconsistency or uncertainty now and then. Oh, they try always to be true to their core beliefs, to achieve their goals and keep their promises. Still, they also avoid too much rigidity, forgiving the occasional contradiction and unexpected thought. They are content to be many."

"Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can’t afford anymore."

"Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction."

"What kind of man takes a live bomb across the seas in order to blow up other people? People who have mothers and lovers and children, just like him? Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex thought. Or, worse, both."

"“Huh,” Sepak thought, marveling how much one could learn by just sitting still and observing. It wasn’t a skill one learned in the frenetic pace of modern society."

"The lesson they took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before a man or woman gives a tinker’s damn about anything as large as a planet."

"On this occasion, despite the wind and sparkling stars, they looked just like huge chunks of stone, pathetically chiseled by desperate folk to resemble stern gods. People did bizarre things when they were afraid...as most men and women had been for nearly all the time since the species evolved."

"Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads. To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn’t take everything else to the grave with it."

"Prison for the crime of puberty—that was how secondary school had seemed, when he really thought back on it."

"They saw the end coming, he thought, looking down the file of awful figures. But they were dead wrong about the reasons why. They assumed only gods had the power to wreak such havoc on their world, but people caused the devastation here. Alex felt compassion for the ancient Pasquans—but a superior sort nevertheless. In blaming gods, they had conveniently diverted censure from the real culprit. The designer of weapons. The feller of trees. The destroyer. Man himself."

"There’s no urgency, a third voice urged, pleading compromise. No duty calls. Hold onto the illusion a little longer. So she tried to go on pretending. After all, can’t believing sometimes make dreams come true? No, it can’t. Besides, you're awake now."

"Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view."

"“All this talk of using tax policy to ‘assess social costs’...what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.”"

"One of life’s joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks...who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it."

"She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship—in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky."

"From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous."

"The good side of the world media village was the sense it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely new."

"It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions."

"What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was."

"“You think I'm kidding?” the pilot asked. “No, we think you're crazy.”"

"It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real."

"Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid."

"Of course, sometimes a species’ invention only benefited itself. Goats developed an ability to eat almost anything, right down to the roots. Goats proliferated. Deserts spread behind them. Then another creature appeared, one whose originality was unprecedented. Its numbers grew. And in its wake some other types did flourish. The common cat and dog. The rat. Starlings and pigeons. And the cockroach. Meanwhile, opportunity grew sparse for those less able to share the vast new riches—huge expanses of plowed fields and mowed lawns, streets and parking lots... The coming of the grasses had left its mark indelibly on the history of the world. So would the Age of Asphalt and Concrete."

"We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists."

"Apocalypses, apparently, are subject to fashion like everything else. What terrifies one generation can seem obsolete and trivial to the next. Take our modern attitude toward war. Most anthropologists now think this activity was based originally on theft and rape—perhaps rewarding enterprises for some caveman or Viking, but no longer either sexy or profitable in the context of nuclear holocaust! Today, we look back on large-scale warfare as an essentially silly enterprise."

"A hallmark of sanity, Alex, is the courage to face even unpleasant points of view."

"Life is not fair...Anyone who says it is, or even that it ought to be, is a fool or worse."

"Had I been wrong, this would still have been the honorable thing to do. I am very glad, however, to find out that I was right."

"“This is a lovely world,” he sighed. “And yet it has suffered horror. Sometimes, so-called civilization seems bent on destroying those very things which it is sworn to protect.”"

"“After all,” he muttered, “what can they do to shake the confidence of a fellow who’s got delusions of adequacy?”"

"He was, after all, a diplomat, and understood that the best and firmest deals are based on open self-interest."