"Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing."

Alastair Reynolds Literature See all quotes by Alastair Reynolds →

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“She wondered if she could put a dart in his eye. It would not kill him, but it might take the edge off his cockiness.”

“His parents had abdicated responsibility to an illusion.”

“But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.”

“I felt a terrible sadness open inside me, a void through which the winds from the end of the universe were blowing.”

“The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.”

“Sorry, Campion, but we can’t trust Lady Luck any more. Lately she’s taken to pissing on us from a great height.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Western intellectuals fail to understand and appreciate the form of society that has given us the ability to alter those defaults. They believe both that the most productive human cultures are almost …"

— Alan Charles Kors

Education1943

#knowledge

"We take for granted that the organism does not learn to grow arms or to reach puberty... When we turn to the mind and its products, the situation is not qualitatively different from what we find in th…"

— Noam Chomsky

Philosophy1928

#knowledge

"How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the s…"

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature1803–1882

#life

"Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who …"

— Thomas Merton

Religion1915–1968

#knowledge