Ken MacLeod Quotes
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Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about when your personalities and sexualities were compatible.
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It’s a big coincidence. It’s something we can’t explain. But as far as we know that’s all it is. And if it isn’t, we’ll only find out by discovering more facts, not speculating, no matter how logical that speculation might seem. The way to learn the world is to look at the world.
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(on The Hamburg Cell): 'It shows them as weak, alienated individuals being recruited by the classic methods of any campus cult. Young men without a strong sense of self are a Microsoft for mind viruses, and these were no exception.' weblog post, 3 September 2004
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She knew about these asteroids, of course. It was because she had classified them in the wrong mental category that she hadn’t thought of them.
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I'm a long-term optimist, and I don't think the problems with our society are from being overly optimistic.
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Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least.
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The real world is far too complex and unpredictable to make something like the idea of humanity controlling its own evolution or engineering itself - well, I wouldn't say impossible but it should be approached with a degree of caution.
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'The uploads replicate and develop relationships. Most of them go very bad. You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God.' – Newton's Wake
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If you, dear reader, are looking a this across some great gulf of time and increase of knowledge, spare me your condescension. You too were young once, and ignorant once, and from a future standpoint-perhaps your own-you are young and ignorant still.
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I don't really believe in the Devil, but if the Devil is the Father of Lies, then he certainly invented the Internet.
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What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?
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The cover pirated the pictures on the Southern pamphlet and headlined a story whose title, 'Invasion from Infinity!,' bore witness to a brash disdain of doing right as much as of blithe contempt for having been proved wrong.
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For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.
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Darvin listened to the hymn with a mixture of enjoyment of its beauty and disdain of its content.
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It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee.
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'Anyway...I find what you write interesting.''That’s what people usually say when they disagree with it.'
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The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.
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'We’re in danger of losing the ship generation.''I’m aware of the problems,' she said. '‘You can’t tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.’ Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.'
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Science fiction made me aware of how big and strange the universe was, leaving aside the whole question of aliens.
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I’m sure they’ll come up with all kinds of rationalizations, if the human precedent is anything to go by.
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All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?
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It saddened him that military technology was so much more advanced than he’d ever imagined.
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The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission.
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'… a faded black T-shirt with a soaring penguin and the slogan 'Where do you want to come from today?'' – Newton's Wake