David Z

“My inappropriate remarks are an alloy of 40 grams copper, 25 grams zinc, 15 grams nickel, 5 grams bashfulness, and 97 kilograms malice.”
― NisiOisiN, Bakemonogatari, Part 1: Monster Tale

“The essential fallacy,' Ghoti picks up, 'is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.'
'On this basis, either everything of sufficient complexity is sentient, whether it feels itself to be or not, or nothing is.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Like most men with a vision, a plan, a program or a remedy, he fondly imagined people to be intelligent enough to accept a good thing when it was offered to them, which was conclusive evidence that he knew little about the human race.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin