Ken MacLeod

"It’s a big coincidence. It’s something we can’t explain. But as far as we know that’s all it is. And if it isn’t, we’ll only find out by discovering more facts, not speculating, no matter how logical that speculation might seem. The way to learn the world is to look at the world."

"Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Ramon. Komarov, Grissom, White, Chaffee, Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsayev, Resnick, Scobee, Smith, McNair, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Onizuka. These names will be written under other skies."

"The uploads replicate and develop relationships. Most of them go very bad. You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God."

"Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear *fucking* weapons."

"It shows them as weak, alienated individuals being recruited by the classic methods of any campus cult. … Young men without a strong sense of self are a Microsoft for mind viruses, and these were no exception."

"For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable."

"It saddened him that military technology was so much more advanced than he’d ever imagined."

"Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least."

"It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee."

"The cover pirated the pictures on the Southern pamphlet and headlined a story whose title, “Invasion from Infinity!,” bore witness to a brash disdain of doing right as much as of blithe contempt for having been proved wrong."

"Darvin listened to the hymn with a mixture of enjoyment of its beauty and disdain of its content."

"All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?"