Top 100 Vinge Quotes
#1. As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'
Stephen Hawking
#2. Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. ... Can events be guided so that we may survive? VERNOR VINGE, 1993
Daniel H. Wilson
#3. Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.
Joan D. Vinge
#4. Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.
Joan D. Vinge
#5. This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an Applied Theology course.
Vernor Vinge
#6. We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance ... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.
Joan D. Vinge
#7. There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares ... heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled.
Joan D. Vinge
#8. Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?
Joan D. Vinge
#9. Even so, Jefri. You recognize that Nevil is evil?" Jefri looked away from her, as if refusing to answer. After a moment, Amdi said, "You know he's evil, Jefri." Finally,
Vernor Vinge
#10. Hexapodia as the key insight ... I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs?
Vernor Vinge
#11. Don't worry. You're safe now. You've got nothing left to steal.
Joan D. Vinge
#12. All [people] are intolerant ... Only they're intolerant of different things.
Joan D. Vinge
#13. As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.
Joan D. Vinge
#14. welts long enough for them to grow eyes. Nature does indeed prefer that cobblies be created right before the Dark.
Vernor Vinge
#15. What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.
Joan D. Vinge
#16. I am only a cup that knowledge holds. It does not to knowledge matter how poor the cup is. It is the wisdom of those who drink of me that me wise makes. Fools make a sibyl foolish, wherever she is.
Joan D. Vinge
#17. Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.
Joan D. Vinge
#18. Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
Vernor Vinge
#19. I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
Vernor Vinge
#20. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle.
Vernor Vinge
#21. Poor humans; they will all die.""Poor us; we will not.
Vernor Vinge
#22. Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.
Vernor Vinge
#24. Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.
Vernor Vinge
#25. Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.
Joan D. Vinge
#26. While We are out of Touch or How to Survive and Prosper during the Next Thirty Minutes by Your Friend, the Mysterious Stranger
Vernor Vinge
#27. Maybe everything we do is meaningless. But we have to try, don't we? We have to go on looking for justice ... and settling for revenge.
Joan D. Vinge
#28. These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion; or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.
Joan D. Vinge
#29. Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
Vernor Vinge
#30. He is afraid, as suddenly he knows that he was afraid all along, that if he felt her body so close to him he would never let her go.
Joan D. Vinge
#31. Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.
Vernor Vinge
#32. Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.
Vernor Vinge
#33. All medical men are voyeurs. Why else would they become doctors? Except for the sadists, of course, who simply enjoy the blood and the pain.
Joan D. Vinge
#34. There's no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.
Joan D. Vinge
#35. This might be one of the few basements in Southern California, but it was clearly being used the way Juan's family used the garage.
Vernor Vinge
#36. I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names - and then destroying us.
Vernor Vinge
#38. And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.
Joan D. Vinge
#39. But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
Vernor Vinge
#40. Ravna thought a moment. "Sysadmin is the usual term," she said.
Vernor Vinge
#41. I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.
Joan D. Vinge
#42. The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
Vernor Vinge
#43. To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you'd ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.
Joan D. Vinge
#44. The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.
Joan D. Vinge
#45. It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.
Vernor Vinge
#46. Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.
Joan D. Vinge
#47. Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
Vernor Vinge
#48. The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don't always get what you thought you were asking for.
Vernor Vinge
#49. It doesn't matter. I'm not asking forever of you ... just let me love you now.
Joan D. Vinge
#50. Fong's obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards. So what to look
Vernor Vinge
#51. How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
Vernor Vinge
#52. We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
Vernor Vinge
#53. Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years-and not one of them could come near to this!
Vernor Vinge
#54. Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
Vernor Vinge
#55. Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
Vernor Vinge
#56. We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.
Vernor Vinge
#58. Its agents -- not even
human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the ship's
automation
Vernor Vinge
#59. The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
Vernor Vinge
#60. Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.
Joan D. Vinge
#61. I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
Vernor Vinge
#62. He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
Vernor Vinge
#63. Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.
Vernor Vinge
#64. All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge ... And now revenge was all that life had left for him.
Vernor Vinge
#65. A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.
Joan D. Vinge
#66. For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.
Joan D. Vinge
#67. The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
Vernor Vinge
#68. Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
Joan D. Vinge
#69. It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
Vernor Vinge
#70. Real power is control. Knowing that you can do anything ... and not doing it only because you can.
Joan D. Vinge
#71. Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.
Vernor Vinge
#72. Everything changes, today's tears are tomorrow's absurdities, after all.
Joan D. Vinge
#73. You've made her so beautiful; when she's come to take your life away.
Joan D. Vinge
#74. This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you. And
Vernor Vinge
#75. I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.
Vernor Vinge
#76. For where there is heaven, there can also be hell.
Vernor Vinge
#77. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
Vernor Vinge
#78. Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.
Joan D. Vinge
#79. Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
Joan D. Vinge
#83. You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.
Vernor Vinge
#84. Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
Vernor Vinge
#85. But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives.
Joan D. Vinge
#86. I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.
Joan D. Vinge
#87. Jule was a poet - poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence.
Joan D. Vinge
#88. When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
Vernor Vinge
#89. Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased.
Vernor Vinge
#90. [He] was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become.
Vernor Vinge
#91. Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.
Vernor Vinge
#92. Though his invention worked superbly [ ... ] his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end.
Vernor Vinge
#93. Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.
Joan D. Vinge
#94. Learn to be - gentle with them. Learn that ... that gentleness isn't ... weakness.
Joan D. Vinge
#95. Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
Vernor Vinge
#96. How long must a fish study to understand human motivation?
Vernor Vinge
#97. Things change all the time; but how much of it is real? Does any choice any of us ever makes, no matter how important it seems, really cause a ripple in the greater scheme of things?
Joan D. Vinge
#98. I have come to kill you."The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try.
Vernor Vinge
#99. The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as
long as all the time before
Vernor Vinge
#100. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
Vernor Vinge
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