Josh

“Complain about your crumbling infrastructure and overzealous Homeland Security all you like, but as least you have a system that theoretically provides both, which is a damn sight better for national morale than knowing you don’t, and that at any moment some Aramis-drenched Visigoth could climb in the window of your bedroom, unzip your torso like a garment bag and eat out your liver with a crab fork.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“To qualify as a Seeker, it was necessary to show a high serendipity factor. In my experimental behaviour pool as a child, I had exhibited such a factor, and had been selected for special training forthwith. I had taken additional courses in Philosophical, Alpha-humerals, Incidental Tetrachotomy, Apunctual Synchronicity, Homoontogenesis, and other subjects, ultimately qualifying as a Prime Esemplastic Seeker. In other words, I put two and two together in situations where other people were not thinking about addition. I connected. I made wholes greater than parts. Mine was an invaluable profession in a cosmos increasingly full of parts.”
― Brian W. Aldiss, The 1977 Annual World's Best SF

“The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem