Split Second Quotes

“this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.” —Robert Pirsig”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“We’re the needle on a record player. We stay in an infinitesimally thin band we call now, while the past and future are continually unreachable on either side. At least until the future decides to intersect with our infinitesimally thin needle and play a note.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Spilling blood to protect the homeland was one thing. But spilling blood, only to then vacate hard-won gains on a whim and leave a vacuum that ended up making the problem far worse, was another.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Einstein once quipped that time’s only purpose was to make sure that everything didn’t happen at once.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“But I begin to wonder if he also doesn’t have a demented sense of humor, and thinks it’s fun to throw wild shit our way.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.”  “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.”     48   Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“But this didn’t stop him from fantasizing about her. It never ceased to amaze him the power of the sex drive. No matter how intelligent and rational a person was otherwise, the sex drive was controlled by more primitive regions, and could turn the most brilliant man on Earth into an animal, flirting with disaster in pursuit of physical gratification, even when he knew in his rational mind that this was nothing but a trick played on him by his incorrigible limbic system.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“cradle.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Resting on Nathan’s dresser was a toy commonly called Newton's”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And sometimes a less common word needs to be used to convey a nuance, or achieve a necessary level of precision. But if something can be said simply, it should be. Using big words isn’t impressive. Getting points across simply, succinctly, but with great clarity is.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“The moral: the dimwitted and impulsive might not be able to hold a job or learn algebra, but they sure knew how to screw each other—and reproduce like crazy. The movie took place many generations in the future, after which this reverse evolution had run its inevitable course, resulting in a society largely composed of morons.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“I hate to keep treating the universe like it is a living being, but the way I think of it is that the universe wants to deal with changes in time in the most efficient way possible. And it wants to maintain a single timeline, as infinite timelines aren’t very efficient.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“You reset the universe from the point of the change onward.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“But the bottom line is this, once a timeline affects its own past, even though it erases itself in the process, the effect it had still remains.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“You step onto the Enterprise’s transporter pad. Your information, your pattern, is scanned into a computer. And then you’re destroyed, basically melted down. And a second later a copy of you is reconstituted on the planet below.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Knight wasn’t lying,” whispered Wexler. “You can type inside a Google search bar, and download files, but can’t send anything else through cyberspace, including passwords.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Bobbie Fischer was considered the greatest chess player who ever lived, and he ended up losing complete touch with reality. John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who developed game theory, was debilitated by paranoid schizophrenia. There are”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“The longest tunnel ever constructed, the Delaware Aqueduct, had been completed in 1945, and ran eighty-five miles through solid rock, delivering half of the water used in New York City each day.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And while this might just be the cliché attraction that many students were fabled to feel toward their professors—although this seemed to work better for literature professors than for those teaching physics—he didn’t care.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Most cosmologists agree that dark matter and dark energy make up ninety-five percent of the universe. The parts we can detect, the hundreds of billions of galaxies filled with hundreds of billions of stars and planets, represent only five percent of the total.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“The word dark is a misnomer, since it implies that lack of light is the problem, that if you could just shine a flashlight on dark matter you could see it. But this stuff can’t be detected by our current science. Period.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And Internet is incoming only,” continued Knight. “Brain Trust scientists, and others on this island, can enter terms into a Google search bar, but that’s the only way they can interact with the outside world. The results of their searches can be opened and downloaded, but it’s one-way traffic only.” He smiled. “None of this was easy to do, but it is quite foolproof.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“So I hired consultants to block all communication off the island, from landlines, cells, or computers. Cells can’t get voice, text, e-mail, or Internet.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics, we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.” ​—David Deutsch (Oxford Physicist who laid the foundations for quantum computing) “Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.” ​—Carrie Snow “Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life on this planet.” ​—Unknown (often printed on T-shirts)”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present. —Unknown “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.” —Omar Khayyam”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Richard Kemp, commander of British forces in Afghanistan, had written in a formal report that, “The Taliban’s use of women to shield gunmen as they engage NATO forces is now so normal it is deemed barely worthy of comment.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second