Pandora's Star Quotes

“How you humans survive so much experience is something I shall never understand. To do so much and react to it all in the way you do is as much a curse as a blessing. You never take time to digest and appreciate what happens to you.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Genuine scientific progress is a slow climb, which requires a stable society to support thinkers and theorists over many generations.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Life's a bitch, then you rejuvenate and do it all over again.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“He never did understand why people admired or even collected art. The greatest human artist could never hope to match what nature did with a single flower.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Wherever you find human misery, you find lawyers, either causing it or making a profit from it.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“The hostile force! The reasone the barrier was established. "Astrophysics, do we know what's causing that?"

"No, sir," Bruno said cheerfully. "Not a clue".”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Civilization was a blessing you never truly appreciated until it threatened to collapse around you.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Only people with one short life want to go tearing out into the great unknown with nothing more than a flashlight and a stick to poke the rattlers with.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Chain of command was always a nominal concept in the division, you trusted people to do their job right.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Three hundred and twenty-eight wormholes were opened in unison. They were small, all of them measuring a metre and a half wide. Just enough for a ten-megatonne warhead to pass through. The wormholes closed.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“he said that for wickedness to succeed all it takes is for decent people to do nothing.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“The original castle back in Edinburgh was the seat of Scottish nationalism. It symbolized everything to the diehard believers. Despite all the changes and defeats they endured, the castle stood solid at the center of their capital. They waited for generations for the Scottish nation to be properly reborn after their Bonnie Prince was lost. There were times when the cause seemed impossible, or even cursed; they regained their independence from the English only to lose it again right away with the formation of Federal Europe.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“The end of the world was supposed to be final, an infinite nothing. That would have been a blessing. Instead they had to endure the aftermath, a world of pain and gore and suffering.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Go on, you miserable bastard. Say it! Say it for fuck’s sake. Say: The Ends Justify The Means. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? That’s what you wanted one last time.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Ignore the time factor, it is an unknown you cannot outguess.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain. Maybe that’s why they’re always men, the Foundation just amplified their natural inability to make a commitment.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“I’m asking because rejuvenation is the one thing that is debated endlessly by my caste. We simply cannot decide if we should adopt it here.” “I’d say it was contrary to your whole ethos. This society was formed so people could live their lives and be content. A great deal of that contentment comes from a natural cycle which lies undisturbed, and was never sequenced in by the Foundation. They just gave you the ability to enjoy what was available within a relatively simple framework—at least compared to majority Commonwealth culture. There will always be a job for you whoever you are, a job, or purpose that you will enjoy, and you will be rewarded financially by it no more or no less than anyone else. If you introduce rejuvenation you will start to expand beyond the rate sustainable by your current economy. And your current technoeconomy is the only one suitable for fixed trait castes. The best the Foundation could sequence in was behavior suitable for a particular profession, along with a few extras like dexterity for doctors. But you simply can’t produce dedicated fusion techs or microbiologists, those kinds of professions have too many requirements, there’s no single recognizable aptitude. To support a more modern economy you’d have to despecialize the traits to the point where they’d effectively be dissolved. You’d wind up with normal humans living in an economy that was ideologically driven rather than needs related. There’d be nothing to stop them going and getting a better-paid job on another planet, especially after a couple of centuries of going in to work in the same office.” “Goodness me, and I thought freethinkers such as myself were the only ones who could put together solid logical arguments.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“On a warm April night, Johansson and four colleagues broke into the California Technological Heritage Museum. They ignored the marbled halls filled with giant aircraft and even larger spaceplanes, crept past the display cases full of twentieth-century computers, never even glanced at the first G5 PCglasses, avoided the original motility robots, the SD lasers, a stealth microsub, the prototype superconductor battery cell, and went straight for the dome at the heart of the buildings. Right at the center was the wormhole generator that Ozzie Fernandez Isaac and Nigel Sheldon had built and used to visit Mars. It had taken a lot of negotiation and political maneuvering, but the museum had finally acquired the display rights.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“We do not have the internal nonlogic which you possess, the constant desire to explore without reason.” “You wanted to find the legends,” Ozzie said. “Wasn’t that an unreasonable pursuit?” “Yes. And in that wish I demonstrated a wild aberration from my kind. If verification of my elder parent’s story was required, then my colleagues and I should have begun a systematic investigation. I went by myself because I believed”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“He hated the multitude of handling and transport companies that survived in parasitic bondage with the CST rail network. They were true capitalist entities, producing nothing, charging people to supply products, adding to the cost of living on a hundred worlds, living off those who worked in production. Not, he had to concede, that those who worked in production these days were the old working classes in a true Marxist definition; they were all engineers who went around troubleshooting cybernetics. But for all the changes and undeniable improvements automation and consumerism had brought to the proletariat’s standard of living, it hadn’t changed the financial power structure that ruled the human race. A tiny minority controlled the wealth of hundreds of worlds, bypassing, buying, or corrupting governments to maintain their dominance. And here he was, living among them, a keen consumer of their products, daunted by their size, his life’s purpose almost lost as he sold more and more of himself to Johansson’s cause. A cause that was now giving him a great deal of concern.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“The path we walk and love goes round and round, and thus it can never end, Ozzie,” the Silfen woman said. She sounded profoundly sad, as if she was telling him about death. “It begins when you begin. It ends as you end.” “And in between? What then? Is that when we sing?” “Walking the path you hear many songs. Songs to treasure. Songs to fear.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Hearken to the knowing, Ozzie, as you tread paths through lost worlds. Full with understanding you shall become to the delight of your stubborn self. Wonder begats not only the joy but the sorrow. Both must be for the other to live for ultimately they are twined into the one. Here you come where few have been, so deep is your need, so loud is your song. Still we love you though you are not ready to fall into the one circle of light and air where the song will be sung to the end be it bitter or be it sweet.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“The cybersphere is susceptible to monitoring even if we encrypt—in fact, especially if we encrypt. Meetings can be spotted and observed, but it’s a question of balance. You obviously believe it’s the less risky option for the location and situation.” “Very”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Once the lunar factories had been established, they just kept on churning out more solar cells indefinitely, processing them out of moon rock.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“I know why you’re here, I’ve seen it in people before, you think you’re on some kind of mission, you think that makes you invulnerable. Hell, maybe it does, but take it from me, tomorrow is not a good time to test it out, okay?”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“One of the house staff brought Ramon a pot of fresh English breakfast tea. Justine remembered introducing him to that drink, she always found it the best way to start the day. Coffee was too abrupt for her.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“She wasn’t particularly unnerved by him, she’d spent enough time with the superrich to know what they wanted above all else was a show of respect.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“The age of great statesmen and women is long behind us, nowadays we just compromise our way through life.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star