David Z > David's Quotes

“She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species' history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them — not even its own reflection.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Do ye mean to say that humans do not kill one another? Listen, as far as I know, no species of animal exists that does not kill its own kind. No, even among plants, trees rob one another of nutrients.”
― NisiOisiN, KIZUMONOGATARI: Wound Tale

“Love is a verb, I've heard through-out the years, not a noun; to love someone is to take action, to do something in love's name. Love counts most in the present moment.”
― Common, Let Love Have the Last Word

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Aren't you kind, Kanbaru said, [...] 'You must get told that often. That you're a good, kind person.'
Who wants to get told, and often, the kind of thing you tell someone who doesn't have a personality?”
― NisiOisiN, Bakemonogatari, Part 2: Monster Tale

“They speak about 'right' or 'wrong' as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human figure is really capable of choosing between them.”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“Everyone carries some kind of baggage–just as you shouldn't discriminate against someone for their birth or upbringing, you shouldn't pity or envy them, either.”
― NisiOisiN, Bakemonogatari, Part 3: Monster Tale

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm