Brendan > Brendan 's Quotes

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”
― Iain Banks

“Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot”
― Iain M. Banks

“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.”
― Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background

“They speak very well of you".
- "They speak very well of everybody."
- "That so bad?"
- "Yes. It means you can´t trust them.”
― Iain M. Banks

“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."

"I see." The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.

"There's the First Law of Kipple," he said. "'Kipple drives out nonkipple.' Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody here to fight the kipple."

"So it has taken over completely," the girl finished. She nodded. "Now I understand."

"Your place, here," he said, "this apartment you've picked--it's too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apts. But--" He broke off.

"But what?"

Isidore said, "We can't win."

"Why not?" [...]

"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“If there is anything unique about the human animal, it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience.”
― John Gray

“Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.

The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles.

Thus virtual particles are indeed real and have observable effects that physicists have devised ways of measuring. Their properties and consequences are well established and well understood consequences of quantum mechanics.”
― Gordon L. Kane

“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.”
― Philip K. Dick

“There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Lady, I was gonna cut you some slack, 'cause you're a major mythological figure...but now you've just gone nuts!”
― Mike Mignola, Hellboy, Vol. 2: Wake the Devil

“Never worry what other people think of you, because no one ever thinks of you.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 2

“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
― Marvin Minsky

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

“The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.”
― Robert Brault