More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I’m not going to be anybody’s puppet, particularly not my own.”
“The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
“How can I tell,” said the man, “that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”
“I only decide about my Universe,” continued the man quietly. “My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.”
and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
His head was swimming freestyle, but his stomach was doing the butterfly.
“I beg your minuscule pardon?”
He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won’t engulf my head, I can see by infrared, How I hate the night.
Now I lay me down to sleep, Try to count electric sheep. Sweet dream wishes you can keep, How I hate the night.
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying “And another thing …” twenty minutes after admitting he’d lost the argument.
One of those nasty hushes had descended on the place, a missile crisis sort of hush.
They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.
I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always
“In other words—and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxywide success is founded—their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
Any sophisticated knowledgeable person, who had knocked about, seen a few things, would probably have remarked on how much the craft looked like a filing cabinet—a large and recently burgled filing cabinet lying on its back with its drawers in the air and flying. The islanders, whose experience was of a different kind, were instead struck by how little it looked like a lobster.
One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living.
If you are reading this on planet Earth then: A. Good luck to you. There is an awful lot of stuff you don’t know anything about, but you are not alone in this. It’s just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that’s just the way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.
“You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”
Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.
