People From Denver

"Lies are rust on iron. A blemish on power."

"When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends. I'm tired of people doubting. Of people choosing to believe they know what is possible because of what has happened before."

"You have everything, Karnus. Wealth. Power. Seven brothers and sisters. How many cousins? Nieces? Nephews? A father and mother who love you, yet...you are here, drinking alone, killing my friends. Setting the purpose of your life to ending me. Why?" "Because you wronged my family. No one wrongs the Bellona and lives." "So it's pride." "It's always pride." "Pride is just a shout into the wind." He shakes his head, voice deepening. "I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind - how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall." He leans forward. "So you see, pride is the only thing."

"Humans are always negotiating. That's what conversation is. Someone has something, knows something. Someone wants something."

"All my people sing of are memories. And so I will remember this death. It will burden me as it does not burden my fellow students - I must not let that change. I must not become like them. I'll remember that every sin, every death, every sacrifice, is for freedom."

"I am alone with my sin. This is why they rule. The Peerless Scarred know that dark deeds are carried through life. They cannot be outrun. They must be worn if one is to rule. This is their first lesson. Or was it that the weak do not deserve life?"

"What do you live for?" I ask her suddenly. "Is it for me?Is it for family and love? Or is it for some dream?" "It's not just some dream, Darrow. I live for the dream that my children will be born free. That they will be what they like.That they will own land their father gave them." "I live for you," I say sadly. She kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

"In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that's left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines."

"Death isn't empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow. Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, fear of death.I say we break those chains.Break the chains of fear and you break the chains that bind us to the Golds, to the Society. Could you imagine it?"

"From a distance, death seems the end of a story. But when you are near, when you can smell the burning skin, see the entrails, you see death for what it is. A traumatic cauterization of a life thread. No purpose. No conclusion. Just snip. I knew war was dreadful, but I did not expect to fear it. How can anyone not, when death is just a blind giant with scissors?"

"Only humanity could grasp the stars and then let them slip through its fingers for the pettiness in its heart."

"Is a man a coward if he realizes that bravery is just a myth the old tell the young so they line up for the meatgrinder?"

"I do not feel brave. I am not the center of this symphony. No one even cares if I am here. Where is the immortal majesty the poets promised me? Where is the stern will my ancestors preached to their children? It was just an illusion conjured by fools who never left their libraries, or by agents of necessity. This is the Noble Lie."

"I once thought the greatest sin of war was violence. It isn't. The greatest sin is it requires good men to become practical."

"A moving mind is always fed. At rest, mine eats itself."

"They call him father, liberator, warlord, Reaper. But he feels a boy as he falls toward the pale blue planet, his armor red, his army vast, his heart heavy. It is the tenth year of war and the thirty-second of his life."

"If pain is the weight of being, love is the purpose."

"I breathe in the full scent of her. If it ends tomorrow or in eighty years, I could breathe her for the rest of my life. But I want more. I need more. I tilt her slender jaw up with my hand so that she's looking at me. I was going to say something important. Something memorable. But I've forgotten it in her eyes. That gulf that divided us is still there, filled with questions and recrimination and guilt, but that's only part of love, part of being human. Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living."

"What is pride without honor? What is honor without truth? Honor is not what you say. It is not what you read." Romulus thumps his chest. "Honor is what you do."

"It's hard for me to speak to you as if you were not a tyrant," I say. "You sit here and think you are more civilized than Luna because you obey your creed of honor, because you show restraint." I gesture to the simple house. "But you're not more civilized," I say. You're just more disciplined." "Isn't that civilization? Order? Denying animal impulses for stability?"

"What kind of parent would want their children to have servants?" he asks, disgusted by the idea. "The moment a child thinks it is entitled to anything, they think they deserve everything. Why do you think the Core is such a Babylon? Because it's never been told no. "Look at the Institute you attended. Sexual slavery, murder, cannibalism of fellow Golds?" He shakes his head. "Barbaric. It's not what the Ancestors intended. But the Coreworlders are so desensitized to violence they've forgotten it's to have a purpose. Violence is a tool. It is meant to shock. To change. Instead, they normalize and celebrate it. And create a culture of exploitation where they are so entitled to sex and power that when they are told no, they pull a sword and do as they like."

"How can I feel so melancholy for so terrible a past? Maybe it's just the nature of us, ever wishing for things that were and could be rather than things that are and will be."

"No. I am not an anarchist, a communist, a fascist, a plutocrat, or even a demokrat, for that matter. My boys, don't believe what they tell you in school. Government is never the solution, but it is almost always the problem. I'm a capitalist. And I believe in effort and progress and the ingenuity of our species. The continuing evolution and advancement of our kind based on fair competition. Fact of the matter is, Gold does not want man to continue to evolve. Since the conquering, they have routinely stifled advancement to maintain their heaven. They've wrapped themselves in myth. Filled their grand oceans with monsters to hunt. Cultivated private Mirkwoods and Olympuses of their very own. They have suits of armor to make them flying gods. And they preserve that ridiculous fairy tale by keeping mankind frozen in time. Curbing invention, curiosity, social mobility. Change threatens that."

"Yes. I'm alone. I would have thought there to be worse fates than this, but now I know there are none. Man is no island. We need those who love us. We need those who hate us. We need others to tether us to life, to give us a reason to live, to feel."

"Tradition is the crown of the tyrant."

"War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here, you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won't even see it."

"These Peerless thump their chests in salute to me. The monsters. They go with the wind, chasing power. But they don't realize power doesn't shift. Power is resolute. It is the mountain, not the wind. To shift so easily is to lose trust. And trust is what has kept me alive. Trust in my friends, and their trust in me."

"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

"We've maintained accelerating growth over time [in part because of] changes in our institutions. We have things like universities . . . patent laws, [and] research grants which have created incentives for those individuals [who develop innovations] to engage in more discovery. . . . [T]he rules of the game create incentives . . ."

"Paul's insight is that the infrastructure for creating new ideas is the engine room of economic growth. So we need to pay attention to patents, the number of scientists that are out there, the incentives to do science. And as long as we can keep generating new ideas, we can keep generating economic growth."

"Romer demonstrates how knowledge can function as a driver of long-term economic growth. . . . Previous macroeconomic research had emphasised technological innovation as the primary driver of economic growth, but had not modelled how economic decisions and market conditions determine the creation of new technologies. Paul Romer solved this problem by demonstrating how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to produce new ideas and innovations."

"You will almost never see an economist whom the academics themselves regard as important or interesting. For example, niether Robert Lucas, without question the most influential economic theorist of the 1970s, nor Paul Romer, arguably the most influential theorist of the 1980s, has ever appeared on any public affairs program."

"The amazing thing about cities is that they're worth so much more than it costs to build them."

"Many people think that dealing with protecting the environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore the problem. I hope the prize today could help everyone see that humans are capable of amazing accomplishments when we set about trying to do something."

"The question that I first asked was, why was progress . . . speeding up over time? It arises because of this special characteristic of an idea, which is if [a million people try] to discover something, if any one person finds it, everybody can use the idea."

"Economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material."

"Presenting a model is like doing a card trick. Everybody knows that there will be some sleight of hand. There is no intent to deceive because no one takes it seriously. Perhaps our norms will soon be like those in professional magic; it will be impolite, perhaps even an ethical breach, to reveal how someone’s trick works."

"You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about."

"I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?"

"A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key."

"He sorted all the mail into three piles of “for” and “against” and “wildly insane,” then threw all of them into the wastebasket."

"Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?"

"“Fifty-nine,” Mr. Mowen said. “That’s too many coincidences to just be a coincidence.”"

"“Do you like Denver?” “Sure,” I said. I found the pocket-sized recorder and laid it on the table. “Smog, oil refineries, traffic. What’s not to like?”"

"“I’m a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don’t believe dreams have a ‘real’ meaning. They’re a physical process, and any ‘reality’ they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dream lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams.”"

"“In my opinion, dream interpretation as practiced by most Freudian psychiatrists, including some of mine at the Institute, is nothing more than a fancy system of guessing. I think trying to understand the ‘real’ meaning of a dream without reference to the physical state of the dreamer is as pointless as trying to understand what a fever ‘means’ without studying the body.”"

"One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite."

"“Why is it,” Joss said, “that whenever I find you, you are always about to hop in bed with my employer?”"

"“They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?” Colin whispered behind his order of service. “It’s late twentieth century atonal,” Dunworthy whispered back. “It’s supposed to sound dreadful.”"

"It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity."