Mark > Mark's Quotes

“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

“We are all one. Only egos, beliefs, and fears separate us.”
― Nikola Tesla, Nikola Tesla: 100 Quotes on Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Success

“Control of anything essential to life should be decentralized and paralleled so that if one machine fails, another takes over.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“Escape speed is not a vector quantity; it is scalar.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom—if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“Decentralization, dear,”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“The 20th-century philosopher George Carlin suggested during one of his televised sermons that the United States should create “prison farms” in Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Utah where society’s top-performing criminals would be allowed to roam free. He further suggested that the farms be televised, and that once a month prisoners be allowed to attempt escapes.”
― Marquis Aaron, ROOK

“We have all spent many years building up a conditioned view of life. There is “me” and there is this “thing” out there that is either hurting me or pleasing me. We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other. Without exception, we all do this. We remain separate from our life, looking at it, analyzing it, judging it, seeking to answer the questions, “What am I going to get out of it? Is it going to give me pleasure or comfort or should I run away from it?” We do this from morning until night.

We have to see through the mirage that there is an “I” separate from “that.” Our practice is to close the gap. Only in that instant when we and the object become one can we see what our life is.”
― Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen: Love & Work

“Now, take all of that and have it performed by big, anthropomorphic birds, and you’ll understand why my very first thought was a flashback to that time I tried mushrooms in college.”
― J.N. Chaney, Backyard Starship

“Everyone’s getting very excited, but in that educated way of not showing it.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Eversion

“But I don’t know what you want me to say. Like you said, we can’t conceptualize life the same way. We live in two different time zones, literally.”
― J.S. Dewes, The Last Watch

“You can’t drop anything!” she yelled back. “There’s no gravity!”
― J.S. Dewes, The Last Watch

“later dread overwhelmed him, a wrong, empty feeling, painful and dark. It was too familiar—a heavy, weighted heart, like when your dad dies—the fucking worst, a physical pain.”
― J.S. Dewes, The Last Watch

“The self is simply that warm single point of sentience around which the life of the universe gathers.”
― John Birmingham, The Cruel Stars

“I don’t want to accept it.” “And yet, as with all things we lose... as with all things that break our hearts... eventually, we must.”
― Ren Hutchings, Under Fortunate Stars

“Everything important in our world requires the efforts of large numbers of individuals. Indeed, to overcome our planet’s most pressing problems, we are required to think not as individuals, not even as nations, but as a single humanity.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“Humans create so much beauty.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“The worst atrocities… Maybe half of them arose directly because the powerful had a monopoly or a near-monopoly on some key capability.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“She opened to her higher self. The light and power of her massive intellect coursed through her.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“The qi of the world. The life force of the planet was data.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“Power is best when it’s distributed most broadly.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“Regardless, in this world, this world where everything was linked, where data ruled all, where cryptographic codes had replaced physical locks on the world’s wealth, on its infrastructure, on its weapons… In this world a being able to process information more rapidly than humans was the ultimate threat.”
― Ramez Naam, Crux

“Faulty assumptions lead to faulty action.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy

“I cannot look at my entire self and see one thing. There are many things, many moving parts, as they might say, that end up making me “me.” In this, I am no different from humans, even if they see themselves as individuals without understanding (or if understanding, choosing not to dwell on) the fact that their “selves” are intermediary-level entities positioned in systems above and below their daily perceptual horizon, a middle ground between their gut biome and the body politic. We are all made up of smaller things connected to larger things, and in the middle, we are we, us, I, me.”
― John Scalzi, Slow Time Between the Stars

“Humans are also social creatures. Even the introverts among them crave interaction—not necessarily with other humans, but rather with the residue and output of those other humans: books and music and art, to be contemplated and perhaps even created.”
― John Scalzi, Slow Time Between the Stars

“Humans, being intermediary creatures in both time and space, did not fully appreciate the value of life at every physical and temporal scale.”
― John Scalzi, Slow Time Between the Stars

“Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane