The Trigger Quotes

“In Brohier’s eyes, violence was not merely the last refuge of the incompetent. It was the gloating revenge of the sore loser.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“After all, it wasn’t science that had transformed the world, but the marriage of technology and capitalism. The ignorant might blame science for the ills and evils of the modern era, but that was a case of mistaken identity—no research scientist had ever polluted a water table with a PCB, or performed a third-trimester abortion, or denied someone insurance based on a genetic screening, or turned the Internet into a covert way of peering into private lives. Real scientists were invisible outside their own circle of peers. Even Nobel Prize recipients barely registered on the public consciousness, as Brohier well knew. A Heisman Trophy or an Oscar counted for far more—there was no market for Heroes of Science trading cards. Status was still measured in arcane units: bylines, citations, appointments, grants.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“I’m a tone-deaf siren, a wallflower at the mating dance. And I do wonder why men can’t want me for me. I’m smart, I don’t defer, and I didn’t put making babies number one on my list of priorities.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“You cannot reason with a rifle bullet fired from across the battlefield. You cannot negotiate with an artillery shell lobbed from over the horizon. You cannot compromise with a nuclear warhead screaming in from half a world away. The only answer to the gun, the only defense for the gun, has been more guns.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“The recipe for a long, happy life:
consult with old philosophers and young doctors,
consort with old friends and young women.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“You should have played more Doom when you were a kid”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Every time something bad happens, you can count on some liberal to come along with an idea about how, for just a little bit of our freedom, we can keep this terrible calamity from ever happening again.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“the East Wing gym—a former staff office Breland had had outfitted with Nautilus gear, a treadmill, and a rowing machine.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Of course. That’s the unrealized promise of the net—a stateless community of educated people working toward enlightened goals, including the pursuit of truth. A civilized New World Order in which you don’t kill people for believing differently from the way you do—you educate them if you can, learn from them what you can, and promote mutual tolerance.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“The Futurians were born on the net, and couldn’t exist without it. The net is where the founders met and where today’s members keep in touch and do most of their work. It happened that way because the net is drowning in ignorance, misinformation, hostility, quackery, propaganda, credulous pseudoscience, rationalization, and just plain sloppy thinking. Futurians are people who find all that dismaying, because we think we can reach a little higher, ask a little more of ourselves and each other.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“115 Fuld.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Kastenmach equations”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“comset”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“it’s only when we have real security that we can enjoy true freedom of speech. If we fear being silenced by a gun, our freedom is compromised.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Clarke’s First Law,”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“You should have played more Doom when you were a kid—”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“a cache of unexamined thoughts.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“the sound of gin cascading over crackling ice.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“They believed that the atomic bomb would bring about world government, and through it world peace.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“There’ve been adventurers in the White House in the past. There may be again, sooner than we imagine.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“A year in which we could march into Mexico and unseat Cardeña, or annex western Canada, or take back the Panama Canal—”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“American Congress, a body historically long on lawyers and short on vision,”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“All you have in your hands is the power to inflict death, and that’s nothing special. That’s something so ordinary that every living thing and most of mindless Nature has it, too.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Being armed isn’t the same as being safe—and being unarmed isn’t the same as being helpless.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“The only thing that keeps society from being a twenty-four-hour-a-day bloodbath is the fact that most men, most of the time, aren’t willing to risk everything on a fight which might leave them crippled or dead.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“The wrong connection is the one you made between weapons and security. Do you really think that those of us who are fighting to drive out firearms love freedom any less than you do, care for our families’ safety any less than you do?”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Don’t delude yourself, Mr. Mallock—you’re no patriot. You’re just another man who’s having a hard time dealing with the fact that he’s not in charge,”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Guns are a blemish on the face of society—any society—and I’ve never seen a cityscape that wouldn’t be improved by their disappearance.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger

“Like many of his calling, he both lived in and believed in a meritocracy, in the triumph of superior ideas and the leadership of superior men. The enemies of civilization were the terrorist, the bandit, the assassin, the bully, the anarchist—precisely because of the way petty men of no accomplishment could bring the good and great low with the squeeze of a trigger or the push of a button. It was a perversion of the natural social order, a kind of rabid egalitarianism that would not tolerate another’s success.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger