Greg Bear

"Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction."

"Information can be stored even more compactly than in molecular memory. It can be stored in the structure of space-time. What is matter, after all, but a standing-wave of information in the vacuum?"

"We are born in ignorance, we die in ignorance, but maybe sometimes we learn something important and pass it along to others before we die. Or we write it down in a little book."

"Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progr…"

"Can’t own a woman, Mike. Wonderful companions, can’t own them."

"To fight an enemy properly, you have to know what they are. Ignorance is defeat."

"The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound—that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding…"

"Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don’t understand everything."