Hugo Award Winners

"—Why can I never visualize things turning out better as clearly as I can visualize the catastrophes I scraped past by a hair? “Everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds!” Hah!"

"—Among the other things lunatics make: their own version of truth."

"—What was I thinking earlier about lunatics making their own version of truth? Why specify lunatics?"

"A cripple can still be a person, but in what sense is a lunatic human? Humanity’s in the mind, in the tangle of thoughts spun by the brain, and once that’s gone what remains is human only in outward shape."

"Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us."

"Men change their gods, and when they have changed them often enough they cease to fear their power."

"Their lusts had known no limit until now. They had gorged themselves, surpassed their own imaginings again and again, recklessly squandering what they had supposed to be inexhaustible; they had been like children in a house filled with sweetmeats, destroying what they could not consume. Until now. Now it was as though the planet itself was sick of their arrogance."

"Amid the turmoil of change, old people could do no more than wonder what had hit them, and long without enthusiasm for the simpler past."

"Some people—mostly attractive women—don’t believe attractive women can act."

"I don’t believe you can cow people into loyalty. Subservience, maybe. But then you must always trust the retainer who guards your back."

"Independence has limits. But dependence has, too. I want to set some for myself, that’s all."

"Colin felt a shiver pass down his spine. What man, granted total power, could refrain from using it? And would not his first target inevitably be his fellow men?"

"Now, listen. Marriage is binding as a civil contract, but it has—like all my favorite contracts—an escape clause. I make my living by spotting them."

"“The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily."

"One of the first benefits of an improved standard of living, as he had already been superficially aware, is to postpone the age at which a person’s opinions congeal for life. Someone forced by poverty to avoid spending on enlarging his horizons the energy and time needed simply for staying alive adopted the attitudes, ready-made, of his environment. This was why students formed the backbone of so many revolutionary movements, for instance."

"A determined elbow jabbed him in the ribs, and he had to come close enough to waking to resist the nudges. He put both arms around his petite, dark, power-packed wife, Midge, and uttered an optimistic grunt. Seven years of marriage enabled her to translate: “Five more minutes?”"

"Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful."

"Cham Loc knew little of affairs of state, but he was aware that whenever politicians talked about matters of inflexible principle, life was scheduled to become even more difficult that usual."

"“And there are more idiots than suckers in the world,” Barney said with a rueful chuckle. “One every second, not one a minute, right?”"

"If you so much as touch him, I’ll have to smash every bone in your body—twice, to make sure I didn’t miss any the first time. I don’t recommend the experience."

"Joel groaned softly. “I-ah-I don’t think I was altogether myself,” he excused. “Are you ever?” Bertrand countered. “What?” “I am always my self, even when my objurgatory circuits are cut in by some frustration-inducing outside event. But you’re invariably either drunk or suffering indigestion or still half-asleep or so excited as to be manic or so downcast as to be suicidal or—” Loftily Joel broke in: “That’s part of the marvel and wonder of the subjective human experience, not susceptible machine analysis.” He gulped the last of his brandy and set the glass aside. “And we are a fantastic species really, aren’t we? For all our shortcomings! I mean, well—here I am talking to a machine, for pity’s sake, a machine, a manufactured article! So cleverly designed, it’s impossible to tell that its responses are programmed in, not the result of intelligence.” “I resent that,” Bertrand said, but Joel ignored the comment."

"A doctor is as good as the researchers backing him up."

"Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it."

"And by the way, it’s knowledge that moves mountains, you know, not faith."

"Just as seeing Heaven's light gave him an awareness of God's presence in all things in the mortal plane, so it has made him aware of God's absence in all things in Hell."

"That wouldn’t be maturity; it would be letting an expert system make your decisions for you. Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don’t matter. There’s no technological shortcut."

"God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion."

"The universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological."

"What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future. [...] Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it."

"We can’t avoid these images and still live in the modern world. And that means we can’t kick this habit, because beauty is a drug that you can’t abstain from unless you literally keep your eyes closed all the time."

"Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed."

"Technology is being used to manipulate us through our emotional reactions, so it’s only fair that we use it to protect ourselves too."

"Anyone who says the calli movement is good for women is spreading the propaganda of all oppressors: the claim that subjugation is actually protection. Calli supporters want to demonize those women who possess beauty. Beauty can provide just as much pleasure for those who have it as for those who perceive it, but the calli movement makes women feel guilty about taking pleasure in their appearance. It’s yet another patriarchal strategy for suppressing female sexuality, and once again, too many women have bought into it. Of course beauty has been used as a tool of oppression, but eliminating beauty is not the answer; you can’t liberate people by narrowing the scope of their experiences. That’s positively Orwellian. What’s needed is a woman-centered concept of beauty, one that lets all women feel good about themselves instead of making most of them feel bad."

"We’ve reached a point where we can begin to adjust our minds. The question is, when is it appropriate for us to do so? We shouldn’t automatically accept that natural is better, nor should we automatically presume that we can improve on nature. It’s up to us to decide which qualities we value, and what’s the best way to achieve those."

"(about Exhalation) If there’s an overarching theme, it’s that we should take time to appreciate the miracle of existence and cherish the free will we have to pursue our destinies — while we still can."

"Sex isn’t what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is. Some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient. In all of those cases the people are unwilling to make an effort. Having a real relationship, whether with a lover or a child or a pet, requires that you be willing to balance the other party’s wants and needs with your own."

"What we now call young-earth creationism used to be common sense; up until the 1600s, it was widely assumed that the world was of recent origin. But as naturalists began looking at their environment more closely, they found clues that called this assumption into question, and over the last four hundred years, those clues have multiplied and interlocked to form the most definitive rebuttal imaginable."

"Much of modern astronomy is promised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism."

"But the church as an institution has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s not."

"Even if humanity is not the reason for which the universe was made, I still wish to understand the way it operates. We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how."

"He was in no position to judge these people. So what if they felt sorry for themselves? Better to wallow in self-pity over nothing than to have actually screwed up your life."

"Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious."

"One proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders. Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy."

"“But I still feel like it’s my fault.” Dana nodded. “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”"

"Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent. I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own."

"If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible."

"When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth."

"Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits."

"Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience."

"The rewards will be purely intellectual, and over the long term, will that be enough?"