Greg Bear Quotes

#1. She has these strange gray eyes that let me see all the way back to when her scorn shaped men's lives.

Greg Bear

#2. For years, even before 9/11, I've been trying to warn that the threat from amateur biolabs will ultimately turn out to be far more troublesome than leakage from military labs - perhaps even more costly and deadly than nuclear terrorism.

Greg Bear

#3. In a world of fragile self-justification, the truth made no one happy.

Greg Bear

#4. Thought moves like a dissociation of leaves across a lawn in a breeze.

Greg Bear

#5. Didn't anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people - perhaps many people - to death, grief, torment?

Greg Bear

#6. Odd how food and water and a clean body - and a few moments of rest - lead me into philosophy.

Greg Bear

#7. To fight an enemy properly, you have to know what they are. Ignorance is defeat.

Greg Bear

#8. Man is the poet who kills, Woman the angel who eats.

Greg Bear

#9. Nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten.It was in the blood, the flesh,And now it is forever.

Greg Bear

#10. There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive-and getting away with it-is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.

Greg Bear

#11. He had had a dream he couldn't remember clearly now. His mind shuffled palm leaves over the sand to hide the tracks of the subconscious at play.

Greg Bear

#12. Apocalypse could not be repealed by the democratic process.

Greg Bear

#13. Sometimes the problem outshines the pain.

Greg Bear

#14. We survived the Shaping Sickness. Forerunners hoped to learn the secret of how we survived the Shaping Sickness, but we would not give it to them, even under torture!

Greg Bear

#15. Chemists did it in their tubes and doctors did it with patience, but only a techie would do it in geometric progression.

Greg Bear

#16. But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations - particularly when the something you're fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.

Greg Bear

#17. They start again as children - all together. It is what the Composer was designed to prevent.

Greg Bear

#18. Can the Flood choose to infect, or not to infect?

Greg Bear

#19. Rendezvous with the robots after a fast

Greg Bear

#20. It's kind of a misnomer about science fiction that science fiction is about anything other than people. It's about people doing stuff, sometimes doing extraordinary stuff.

Greg Bear

#21. There is no war so important that to win it, we must destroy our minds.

Greg Bear

#22. The death of a world is judgment of its inadequacy. Death removes the unnecessary and the false.

Greg Bear

#23. It is the bullet you don't hear that gets you.

Greg Bear

#24. Welcome to the truth of our world-a massive seed shot out to the stars, filled with deadly children. A seed designed to slay everything it touches.

Greg Bear

#25. Throughout my life, I sought power and profit for myself, for my rate. Now, at long last, I think I understand the meaning of a crime against the Mantle. After this, no need to seek balance. I will await my penance here.

Greg Bear

#26. This is the one who betrays Forerunners, their own greatest monster. We know this one. Remember?

Greg Bear

#27. We fought and argued and loved and learned through the long, cold voyage. We chose teams, disbanded, re-formed, chose again, and now the fit is perfection within diversity.

Greg Bear

#28. So this additional indignity will be inflicted upon you. It means, I believe, that humans will not end here, but may rise again - fight again. Humans are always warriors.

Greg Bear

#29. The asteroids interfere with the collapsing function of each emerging ship; in effect, either forcing them to abandon the transit, or to combine asteroid mass with the ship's.

Greg Bear

#30. We hope for sympathy in a violent, damning, world, all that we've known and experienced in real life - as opposed to phantom memory. We long for confirmation and completion and justification - and we also long to survive and learn that our reckless existence has meaning.

Greg Bear

#31. Mother Nature is a bitch.

Greg Bear

#32. Desert and Death Valley were the Mecca and Al Medina

Greg Bear

#33. Explain it to me. God says he loves me but dumps me into a world of pain. You, so full of hate, so ignorant, he leaves alone. Self-righteous bigots he doesn't even touch. Explain that to me!

Greg Bear

#34. I begin to rant. I'm special, I have needs, I have a job to do - once I get my act together. I'm going to be important.

Greg Bear

#35. In the society of would-be-gods, a humble man is always polite.

Greg Bear

#36. Having undergone that disintegration and dying of past individuals and rebirth into something vastly more powerful, all these creatures had joined millions of years before into its own early Gravemind, far more than the sum of its parts.

Greg Bear

#37. You are what you leave behind.

Greg Bear

#38. Working in Isaac's universe was more of a treat than a challenge.

Greg Bear

#39. No more will. No more freedom. Nothing new but agonizing death and never good shall come of it. We are the last of those who gave you breath and form, millions of years ago. We are the last of those your kind defied and ruthlessly destroyed. We are the last Precursors. And now we are legion.

Greg Bear

#40. Angrier and angrier, that he had to do such things because men were filled with arrogant greed, because some wished to rule with neither the wit nor the self-knowledge to see their inadequacies - and how many of their people would die.

Greg Bear

#41. Work, fight, live. All the sweeter. Mind after mind will shape and absorb. In the end, all will be quiet with wisdom.

Greg Bear

#42. Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization ...

Greg Bear

#43. From horizon to horizon the sky was filled with stars to within a few degrees of a fresh sliver of moon, a tiny thing lost in the yawn of night.

Greg Bear

#44. The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside. The seventh chamber went on forever.

Greg Bear

#45. Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don't understand everything.

Greg Bear

#46. Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many decades ... It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority of the wealthy.

Greg Bear

#47. No immunity and no cure. There is only struggle, or succumb. Either way, the Primordial will have its due. We have met our creators, they have given us the answers we sought - and that is our curse.

Greg Bear

#48. I will learn by screwing up.

Greg Bear

#49. Marty knew about rituals. "That means we're supposed to do something a certain way so we won't feel guilty," he said. "You got it," Harry said. Marty

Greg Bear

#50. Robert's problem was familiar to Aquinas. He called it ignorantia affectata, cultivated ignorance.

Greg Bear

#51. The horizon curved upward to both sides. Not good, not right. Horizons do not curve up.

Greg Bear

#52. Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful, it's tough, it's buried in our mythic, childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.

Greg Bear

#53. Occupation of vast reaches of space means nothing. It is control of population centers and essential resources that determines victory or defeat.

Greg Bear

#54. I now understand why humans smile. Forerunners have done all they can to banish smiles. Not all smiles are about greetings and joy. Some smile in shared pain.

Greg Bear

#55. It's out there," Bitterness says. "Your monster. Mendicant Bias. Can't you feel it?

Greg Bear

#56. All things will be ambiguous, for this is the curse of wisdom.

Greg Bear

#57. Living things see only the surface, can't exist in the depths. Life is painted on the surface of the real. Death is the great unexplored volume. Death rises from the inaccessible, depth and death sounding so much alike ... There

Greg Bear

#58. They're trying to understand what space is. That's tough for them. They break distances down into concentrations of chemicals. For them, space is a range of taste intensities.

Greg Bear

#59. It's been a great place to get in touch with what people are really thinking. And to make contact with readers and other writers. Egalitarian, wide open, like the Wild West!

Greg Bear

#60. We're told another large-scale terrorist attack is inevitable by those people who have committed so many resources to preventing it. They likely know what they're talking about.

Greg Bear

#61. Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.

Greg Bear

#62. Having one's eyes opened doesn't make one grateful.

Greg Bear

#63. Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings - stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.

Greg Bear

#64. But ingenuity is often indistinguishable from foolish play, and foolish play is one of those traits I find most endearing about humanity.

Greg Bear

#65. All that I was, but for reflections in a cracked mirror, has been lost for a long, long time.

Greg Bear

#66. Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status.

Greg Bear

#67. Stars I understand. They shed light and give life. It is the emptiness between that haunts me.

Greg Bear

#68. Maybe that's what your machine calls infection - all the new information in my blood. Chatter. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.

Greg Bear

#69. We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why. Planetisms that don't know enough to keep quiet, get eaten.

Greg Bear

#70. What I could not understand was why the Didact had decided to save one of those very weapons whose creation he had so decisively opposed.

Greg Bear

#71. This is solute, which will cause every animal killed by Halo action to instantly decay into component molecules. This will avert an ecological miasma. But it could also be construed as a way to hide a tremendous crime from later investigators.

Greg Bear

#72. My finest opponent, the Mantle accepts all who live fiercely, who defend their young, who build and struggle and grow, and even those who dominate - as humans have dominated, cruelly and without wisdom.

Greg Bear

#73. I'm still out there. In my head. I have to sort it out or I'll never come home.

Greg Bear

#74. Once again, human history proved that the worst mistake possible in politics was underestimating one's opponents. Van

Greg Bear

#75. I sometimes think we deserve to die, we're all so goddamned stupid.

Greg Bear

#76. To see the awful things is to see life as it really is. It makes you sharper, stronger, superior. You can stand it when others cannot.

Greg Bear

#77. Oh, there will still be deception. The fresh crew will emerge as adults, will have memories of past training and lives. Our stories, our lives, will go on. I refuse to allow that love to die, just because it was never real.

Greg Bear

#78. Of course! We laid waste their fleets, attacked their outpost worlds. ... And the Forerunners themselves found a way to bring down the indestructible architecture of the Precursors, on Charum Hakkor. ... Charum Hakkor, once called the Eternal.

Greg Bear

#79. You deserve whoever governs you ... Everyone is responsible for the actions of their leaders.

Greg Bear

#80. If we who are honored with life do not perceive the obvious, then we are forced to live it again, around another corner, from another angle.

Greg Bear

#81. Of all the planets apart from Earth in our solar system, Mars is the most hospitable. Yeah. Right. Better keep my visit short. And yet, despite the discomfort, the danger, I love it here. I love coming back for these imaginary vacations. The sights are amazing.

Greg Bear

#82. They understood the universe in ways we never will. We can't unlock their secrets - but now, apparently, we can destroy all they ever made. That's what I call progress.

Greg Bear

#83. UR-DIDACT: This being was not the Primordial I encountered on Charum Hakkor, but something else entirely - though it retained the Primordial's motives and thoughts and memories. It was a Gravemind - the Gravemind, more accurately. It was the Primordial's final act of revenge.

Greg Bear

#84. When all hopes are lost, only then does reality acquire that sharp focus that defines who we are and what we have become.

Greg Bear

#85. Humans believe in nothingness, in zeros. It is one of their distinguishing traits. They keep inventing nothing. Forerunners know otherwise.

Greg Bear

#86. Science fiction works best when it stimulates debate.

Greg Bear

#87. Some adopted new strategies for survival; they went dormant. Others became dust that could regenerate our past forms; time rendered this dust defective. It brought only disease and misery; but that was good, we saw the misery and found it good.

Greg Bear

#88. He held her hand and shook his head. "They're inside, part of us by now. They are us. Where can we escape?

Greg Bear

#89. She didn't want to change just to be better. Though there was always better to aspire for. It was very confused.

Greg Bear

#90. All it takes to get elected in twenty-first-century America is a mob of frightened sheep and a wolf with a nice smile,

Greg Bear

#91. All dreams are young, my host, my friend. All dreams belong to youth, whether they be nightmares or idylls.

Greg Bear

#92. Equal in law is not equal in nature.

Greg Bear

#93. If the Domain is destroyed, I have condemned my husband to an eternity of darkness, silence, with only his own rage and madness to keep him company.

Greg Bear

#94. The price of freedom - of individuality - is attention to politics, careful planning, careful organization; philosophy is no more a barrier against political disaster than it is against plague.

Greg Bear