The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)

by Liu Cixin

“More than three hundred years! A dozen generations. When this tree was but a shrub, it was still the Ming Dynasty. During all these years, can you imagine how many storms it had weathered, how many events it had witnessed? But in a few minutes you cut it down. You really felt nothing?”

If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?

Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean.… It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.

Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?

By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”

Everyone likes to reminisce, but no one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

We should speak up as well. Only then will they get a complete picture of human society. It’s not possible to get the truth by only listening to one side.

“No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.”

“Each individual’s behavior is so simple, yet together, they can produce such a complex, great whole! Europeans criticize me for my tyrannical rule, claiming that I suppress creativity. But in reality, a large number of men yoked by severe discipline can also produce great wisdom when bound together as one.”

Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos?

“Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations. You probably know that the American government just refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.… The entire human race is the same. As long as civilization continues to develop, the swallows I want to save and all the other swallows will go extinct. It’s just a matter of time.”