Socialists From The United States

"It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds."

"Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable."

"To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses."

"Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it."

"Thinking it over, Sax said,”Do you ever worry that work on a realm so far beyond the reach of experiment will turn out to be a kind of house of cards—knocked over by some simple discrepancy in the math, or some later different theory that does the job better, or is more confirmable?” “No,” Bao said. “Something so beautiful as this has to be true.”"

"Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do."

"A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived?"

"Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"“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?"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"“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."

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

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

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

"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.”"

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

"Every generation is its own secret society."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"“Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.” Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!”"

"“Part of a team,” Ann said dully. “Well, you are.” “I know.” She sighed. “We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”"

"“You damned liberals.” “I don’t know what that means.” “It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”"

"“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”"

"“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”"

"So life adapts to conditions. And at the same time, conditions are changed by life. That is one of the definitions of life: organism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole."

"Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate."

"You can’t make love to your fame. Even though some people try."

"That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size."

"Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred."

"And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking—an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything."

"Well, societies without a plan, that was history so far; but history so far had been a nightmare, a huge compendium of examples to be avoided."

"Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful."

"...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust."

"Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people."