The machine mother cannot help you inside the biomass. Her coldness is — System Shock

"Make yourself comfortable, Hacker. Stay a while."

"Paul Stannek: Cyborg assassin shot him in the back of the head... didnt even touch me. They knew DArcy was on to something."

"Edward Diego: A TriOp security team just tried to land in bay 6. They were real impressive til I blew out their attitude jets. Hey SHODAN, take a letter; Dear TriOp, please send some more people to investigate me. I run security, I run the robots, Im jamming communications. Thats right, Rebecca. Investigate me -- investigate my butt. Note to myself, keep that hacker on ice for a while in case I need him. Otherwise, just take him out."

"The automated asteroid ore facilities in JM-432 supply the UNN shipyards, so theyre crucial to defense. However, theyre also prime candidates for hackers. Somebodys gotten their claws into the primary data loop, and they need a team to head in there and blast their way past the automated defense systems."

"The Poliedes Trading Station has long been a haven for the black market. However, up until now they have not interfered with the running of station operations. Recent reports indicate that the Poliedes command staff has been overthrown, and the station is under the control of a self-appointed magnate. This must be rectified and a marine presence maintained on the station."

"Welcome to my DEATH MACHINE, interloper!"

"If it fulfills our hopes, this center will be, at once, a symbol and a reflection and a hope. It will symbolize our belief that the world of creation and thought are at the core of all civilization. Only recently in the White House we helped commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare. The political conflicts and ambitions of his England are known to the scholar and to the specialist. But his plays will forever move men in every corner of the world. The leaders that he wrote about live far more vividly in his words than in the almost forgotten facts of their own rule. Our civilization, too, will largely survive in the works of our creation. There is a quality in art which speaks across the gulf dividing man from man and nation from nation, and century from century. That quality confirms the faith that our common hopes may be more enduring than our conflicting hostilities. Even now men of affairs are struggling to catch up with the insights of great art. The stakes may well be the survival of civilization. The personal preferences of men in government are not important--except to themselves. However, it is important to know that the opportunity we give to the arts is a measure of the quality of our civilization. It is important to be aware that artistic activity can enrich the life of our people, which really is the central object of Government. It is important that our material prosperity liberate and not confine the creative spirit."

"The last place I wanted to return to was the music business. But its the people and the cause that matter and right now theres an important need, which is bridge-building. I wanted to support the cause of humanity, because thats what I always sang about. Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again. Its a big step for me but its a natural step. I dont feel at all irked by the responsibility — I feel inspired."

"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances."

"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set..."

"Just as we preach a "black peril" so they will begin to speak of a "white peril" and of the hostility the white men have toward them."

"The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead ... were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings of exultation, and to remind one of the grim reality that war is. And even though these were the faces and the sufferings of our enemy, one had ... a deeper sense of the common humanity which knows no racial distinctions."