And I stood before him, and I sang unto her, and it appeared to listen — Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

"A ship at sea is its own world. To be the captain of a ship is to be the unquestionable ruler of that world and requires all of the leadership skills of a prince or minister."

"Abort, Retry, Fail? was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, wed remind them: if you see this message, always choose Retry."

"You waited so long to heed us, EarthDeirdre, Almost we pruned you, as we may yet prune your branches."

"This unusual specimen is not so much a classic particle as a connector--a kind of string attaching two particles. As distance increases the connective power becomes attenuated, but if it is cut the power vanishes: forever."

"Until now the battle had been proceeding smoothly. The enemy was outflanked and had been driven from the reactor housing, but against the reactor itself the matter cannons were strangely ineffective. Rounds simply... stopped. In mid-air."

"Planets atmosphere, though a gasping death to humans and most animals, is paradise for Earth plants. The high nitrate content of the soil and the rich yellow sunlight bring an abundant harvest wherever adjustments can be made for the unusual soil conditions."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"