The Corporation Wars Trilogy Quotes

“Orgel’s rule—“Evolution is smarter than you”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“It’s elementary chaos theory, or to give it its popular designation—Murphy’s Law. Random changes happen all the time. Mistakes accumulate. Correcting them brings further changes. As someone smarter than me once said, evolution is smarter than you.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“New generations replace us. Humanity will evolve. Death is the deal we strike for the future.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“Heroism was cheap; most times and places it could be bought for starvation wages.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“Nobody really feared death, only the imagined or (for copied minds at least) real prospect of aversive stimuli afterwards.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“providential ease and preternatural agility”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“Auditory and visual hallucinations and delusions of competence are not diagnostic and not expected.>”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“nugatory”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“Idiocy is the new black.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“Unite all who can be united against the main enemy,”> jeered Rillieux. ”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“How could they be so incurious? And so selectively ignorant? Maybe they were just thick.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“paper-clip catastrophe.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“never underestimated the power of baseless confidence. It had got him where he was, and it would get him further.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“How can we upstart apes design the overman? Impossible!”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“The scrutiny of ambition is as ceaseless and pitiless as that of natural selection.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“people are fucking stupid, and the machines they build—whether it’s bureaucracies or corporations or AIs—have the same old fucking stupidity built in right at the base, and then they add new stupidities of their own.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“swaying in the chair. “And you know why? Because people are fucking stupid, and the machines they build—whether it’s bureaucracies or corporations or AIs—have the same old fucking stupidity built in right at the base, and then they add new stupidities of their own.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“you were remarkably less competent than anyone looking at your manifest capacities would have predicted”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“I know no details of this, because I do not need it. Therefore you need not question me further about it.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“Borges? ‘The Library of Babel’?”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“It’s about randomness. In theory you can find any book in it, and in practice you can’t find any book at all.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“not stupid exactly, but limited, like an engine of immense power that ran on rails.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“The Direction didn’t know of this and would be implacably opposed if it did. Carlos worried about that. Durward’s response was simple: “They’ll thank us later.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“You can’t always trust a society’s facts,” Carlos said. “But you can trust its fiction.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“His side was that of those striving for a new thing, and carving a new place for themselves, in these new worlds.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“When he’d first arrived in the Locke Provisos sim, and got the talk from the lady, he’d been appalled by the paucity of the Direction’s aims. Populating extrasolar systems with an essentially unmodified humanity had seemed to him a waste of time and space. Further conversations with Nicole had done nothing to shift his low opinion of low horizons.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“Carlos had deliberately taken a bite of crisp brown crust, soft white bread, ham and salad and mustard mayo halfway through Jax’s tirade, and he made a point of chewing it as slowly and insultingly as he could until she’d finished. He swallowed, then he drained the dregs of his coffee. He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling his fingers run through his still unfamiliar long hair, and straightened out his spine.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“all this effort to turn one fucking planet into a fucking zoo for a few billion boring biological humanoids, generation after generation, living on a terraformed world for the next few million years, all watched over by machines that aren’t even conscious themselves.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy

“”
― Ken MacLeod, The Corporation Wars Trilogy