Ken MacLeod Quotes

#1. Poor white trash quoting de Maistre and Carlyle and fancying themselves elite while they scrabbled to survive in a world where they were outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones.

Ken MacLeod

#2. The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water.

Ken MacLeod

#3. Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least.

Ken MacLeod

#4. As far as I was concerned, the best thing one could do for the poor was to not add one's self to their number.

Ken MacLeod

#5. 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.

Ken MacLeod

#6. The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.

Ken MacLeod

#7. There is only one way this can end: with the kind of defeat that makes a people feel that their preachers have lied to them, their leaders have deserted them, that the world is against them and that God is dead.

Ken MacLeod

#8. All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?

Ken MacLeod

#9. None of its components were conscious beings. As post-conscious AIs, they were well beyond that. They

Ken MacLeod

#10. I knew from the beginning it was hopeless, but it's possible to love without hope.

Ken MacLeod

#11. Had always believed an immersive virtual reality afterlife was possible in principle. Maybe

Ken MacLeod

#12. Kindle, ah,' said Baxter, 'takes me back.

Ken MacLeod

#13. What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?

Ken MacLeod

#14. Anyway ... I find what you write interesting." "That's what people usually say when they disagree with it.

Ken MacLeod

#15. Carlyle spread her hands. 'I speculated that it was the remains of the starship that took the Eurydiceans to the planet. This seems to have been borne out.' She smiled. 'It transmitted a defensive virus that contained Microsoft patches.

Ken MacLeod

#16. 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.

Ken MacLeod

#17. The defining element of hell was eternal conscious suffering. Here

Ken MacLeod

#18. Green humanism? What's that? Humanism for little green men?

Ken MacLeod

#19. Science fiction made me aware of how big and strange the universe was, leaving aside the whole question of aliens.

Ken MacLeod

#20. I enjoyed Old Man's War immensely. A space war story with fast action, vivid characters, moral complexity and cool speculative physics, set in a future you almost want to live into, and a universe you sincerely hope you don't live in already.

Ken MacLeod

#21. Fascinating,' said Darvin. 'The mystery of life. The miracle of reproduction. I don't know why I didn't learn all this in school.' 'I did not,' said Orro. 'I read it in an imaginative but broadly accurate illustrated treatise inscribed, if memory serves, on the wall of a municipal pissery.

Ken MacLeod

#22. Naive' is not a word I associate with the Southern Rule. Superstitious, perhaps, traditional, yes, maddeningly set in their way, certainly but not naive." "I meant you are naive. They must have a hidden motive." "This is why I have no politics," said Darvin. "I can't think in those terms.

Ken MacLeod

#23. The fourteen conscious robots contemplated their cosmic loneliness for several milliseconds.

Ken MacLeod

#24. There's a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy.

Ken MacLeod

#25. She read it over, decided it was too complicated for Memo, and ran it through an app called MyTxt4Dummies.

Ken MacLeod

#26. The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing.

Ken MacLeod

#27. I'm a long-term optimist, and I don't think the problems with our society are from being overly optimistic.

Ken MacLeod

#28. Software development was insecurities all the way down. Even

Ken MacLeod

#29. Everyone's an equal shareholder. Birth shares are inalienable, and death duties are unavoidable. The estate tax is one hundred per cent. In between, you can buy and sell and earn as much as you like.

Ken MacLeod

#30. 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.

Ken MacLeod

#31. I don't really believe in the Devil, but if the Devil is the Father of Lies, then he certainly invented the Internet.

Ken MacLeod

#32. Syn bio tech had come on stream, springing full-grown from the bench like the Incredible Hulk bursting his lab coat, a great green monster that sucked carbon dioxide from the air and sprouted wood, pissed oil, and shat diamonds.

Ken MacLeod

#33. Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.

Ken MacLeod

#34. If you're interested, you'll be there.

Ken MacLeod

#35. It is possible that we are the only persons,> said another robot.

Ken MacLeod

#36. But isn't it enough that I just don't want it?"
"No," said Fiona. "It isn't enough."
"Why not?"
"Well, if that was enough, if just saying no and not giving a reason was enough, where would we be? It would just be chaos.

Ken MacLeod

#37. The only way to get there was to burn through capitalism, to get through that unavoidable stage as fast as possible.

Ken MacLeod

#38. The discretion of the watcher versus the privacy of the watched was just another arms race; this one, I could see, would run and run.

Ken MacLeod

#39. Change the problem by changing your mind.

Ken MacLeod

#40. You must rely on reason and science," she said, "and be guided by a likewise rational ethic of human concern. You must do your utmost as individuals to improve your understanding, ability and compassion.

Ken MacLeod

#41. I was overcome by a wave of wonder at how much good was going on, and how you heard about the bad things that happened so much that you overlooked the immensely disproportionate majority of other acts done to the real benefit of self and others without which none of this would be here at all.

Ken MacLeod

#42. The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission.

Ken MacLeod