The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“Our new age of human expansion

will terraform nothing. We will revel in hardships and welcome

strangeness. We will not make the universe adapt …...

Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture

or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.