Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart Quotes

“All things considered, science is the best means of understanding almost everything around us. It works well on the human scale and stands as a stark counter-point to beliefs that by their very nature refute the notion of evidence. And I would be the last person to attack people encouraging the rest of us to use our ability to be rational, thereby defending the value and the necessity of science. But I will lift a querying hand when the notion of ‘science’ is held to be immutable, because ‘science’ as such does not exist. Science is a process to be sure, a way of thinking, but what science is above all is that which scientists do, and alas, scientists are people, too. As potentially fallible, irrational, biased, greedy, in short, as flawed, as the rest of us. So, by all means defend science as a process. But don’t confuse it with the very human endeavor of science as a profession. Because they’re not the same thing. And this is why when some guy in a white lab-coat says ‘you can trust me, I’m a scientist,’ best take it with a big bucket of salt, and then say ‘Fine, now show me the evidence and more to the point, show me how you got to it.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Our education system no longer teaches empathy,’ Sam said. ‘Now, if everybody in college had to take a minor in Literature, the world would be a better place.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice

“Some people just don’t like being told what they can and can’t do.” “Some people use that line to rationalize being assholes”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Humanity’s crisis is, it seems, its inability to appreciate gifts freely given.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“The West has been grinding Islam under its heel for a long time,” he said. “A civilization and a culture beaten into exhaustion, now past its prime and longing for a return to some nostalgic past looking nothing like the real one. Science, literacy, architecture, art, mathematics, tolerance—Islam once led the world in these things. That’s the real past. Not this paranoid, benighted plunge into dogma and ignorance and violence. All those fingers pointing back a thousand years—the Laughing Imam gave them all a nudge, from ignorance into enlightenment. Suddenly, the future wasn’t the false past. Wasn’t an endless succession of cultural, political, and economic defeat at the hands of the Infidel. No, now the future is going to be the rebirth of Islam’s Grand Age. Islam’s civilized glory. Faith not as a weapon, but as an anchor in the storm to come, in the storm now upon us.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Look not to our unknown benefactor for salvation. This is humanity’s war upon itself and the only salvation possible must be found in the eyes of our brother, our sister, our neighbor. Do find the courage, my beloved friend, to meet that gaze.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Law enforcement loses its moral compass when what is asked of it undermines its ethical base. When in service to corruption—and when that corruption is thoroughly even if only unconsciously perceived—despair and nihilism follows. The good is deemed ineffectual. The bad is set upon a movable scale of permissibility, one that inevitably climbs to ever greater extremes. In this context, the police become tribal and will act first and foremost in defense of itself. Further indoctrination reinforces this escalation. In effect, the law rises above the law, and the sudden absence of restraint is an invitation to unchecked brutality.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“When selfishness becomes a pathology, there will be many innocent victims.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“It may come as a surprise to many humans,’ Adam said, and there was a new tone to the disembodied voice, ‘but the assumption that an alien civilisation is interested in reaffirming the artificial hierarchy you have imposed upon yourselves is invariably the first one requiring readjustment.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice

“They didn’t shelter their own, didn’t feed their own, didn’t heal their own, and yet, in the midst of all this inhumanity, they held themselves as the pinnacle of human civilization.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Speaking of which, what’s your take on abortion?’ ‘Do you eat eggs?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘The unborn embryos of chickens, Samantha.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice

“Is the universe holographic? Probably. Get microscopic enough and you start seeing pixels. I don’t know about you, but that makes me laugh. Until I think about how easy it is to hack a program. Any program.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“We define adulthood as a solemn recognition of responsibility. We make the distinction when considering the acts of children, and will argue that they were not responsible, because their brains have not yet matured to make the proper connection between an act and its consequences.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Capitalism is founded on the selective application of freedom among the few at the expense of everyone else.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Comicons and Science Fiction conventions are always fun. Besides, the days of the secluded writer are long gone. What’s ironic is that the modern age has forced the most introverted, shy, and anxious segment of the population into the limelight. Adapt or disappear, and for most of us, conventions are a safe place in which we can learn how to be public figures. And then there’s the blowhards? Did I mention the blowhards?”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“How much of a life was consumed by the sheer effort of coping? Day in, day out, doing all it took, whatever it took, just to get by. Claw your way through, like a drowning man fighting a riptide. Reach the beach if you can, there on that island called sleep. So the mind can run away for a while. Getting ready to tackle the next day”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Always keep it simple. Complex ideas make people nervous. Complex ideas as people to think, and people don't want to think.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“What makes a better human being? Is it just a question of faster, stronger, smarter? But smarter in what way? Computationally? This idea of augmenting our species through technology, adding new RAM to the old hard-drive as it were, seems to miss the point. And that is that we can be better right now, without technology. Augmentation is pointless if we keep repeating the same old mistakes. And efficiency is not the same as better, not even close. You want to be a better human being? Start today.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Damaged children know only despair. When they are grown into adults, that despair lies at the core of all that they do. It shapes their lives. It makes monsters of men and women who in turn perpetuate the cycle of despair with all the victims within their reach. Often, those victims are their own children.' She turned to look up at Kolo. 'This must be forgiven. All must be forgiven. To live the life of a victim is to be trapped inside despair, and no soul deserves that.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Marching on a promise never given,”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart

“Corporate globalism is now the dominant power in your civilization,” Adam said. “Once corporations won the right to be treated as if they were people, the common citizen was disenfranchised, because the law then became the official control system for corporate interests over human interests, and corporations treat citizens as units of economy, thus stripping them of their essential humanity. There’s nothing more inhuman than a corporation and its interests.”
― Steven Erikson, Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart