Earth

Quotes

1. “You think I'm kidding?” the pilot asked.

   “No, we think you're crazy.”

   p. 185

2. 

   Of course, sometimes a species’ invention only benefited itself. Goats developed an ability to eat almost anything, right down to the roots. Goats proliferated. Deserts spread behind them.

   Then another creature appeared, one whose originality was unprecedented. Its numbers grew. And in its wake some other types did flourish. The common cat and dog. The rat. Starlings and pigeons. And the cockroach. Meanwhile, opportunity grew sparse for those less able to share the vast new riches—huge expanses of plowed fields and mowed lawns, streets and parking lots...

   The coming of the grasses had left its mark indelibly on the history of the world.

   So would the Age of Asphalt and Concrete.

   p. 122

3. 

   What kind of man takes a live bomb across the seas in order to blow up other people? People who have mothers and lovers and children, just like him?

   Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex thought. Or, worse, both.

   p. 524

4. 

   A hallmark of sanity, Alex, is the courage to face even unpleasant points of view.

   p. 40

5. 

   The good side of the world media village was the sense it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely new.

   p. 245

6. 

   Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.

   p. 531

7. 

   The lesson they took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before a man or woman gives a tinker’s damn about anything as large as a planet.

   p. 493

8. 

   Prison for the crime of puberty—that was how secondary school had seemed, when he really thought back on it.

   p. 462

9. 

   One of life’s joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks...who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it.

   p. 311

10. 

    “Huh,” Sepak thought, marveling how much one could learn by just sitting still and observing. It wasn’t a skill one learned in the frenetic pace of modern society.

    p. 501

11. 

    Apocalypses, apparently, are subject to fashion like everything else. What terrifies one generation can seem obsolete and trivial to the next. Take our modern attitude toward war. Most anthropologists now think this activity was based originally on theft and rape—perhaps rewarding enterprises for some caveman or Viking, but no longer either sexy or profitable in the context of nuclear holocaust! Today, we look back on large-scale warfare as an essentially silly enterprise.

    p. 48

12. 

    It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.

    p. 236

13. 

    History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.

    p. 656

14. 

    From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous.

    p. 250

15. 

    What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.

    p. 187

16. 

    Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.

    p. 328

17. 

    Nelson replayed his last musings to himself, and silently laughed. Listen to you! Jen was right. You're a born philosopher. In other words, full of shit.

    p. 631

18. 

    It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.

    p. 145

19. 

    Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can’t afford anymore.

    p. 539

20. 

    There’s no urgency, a third voice urged, pleading compromise. No duty calls. Hold onto the illusion a little longer.

    So she tried to go on pretending. After all, can’t believing sometimes make dreams come true?

    No, it can’t. Besides, you're awake now.

    p. 353

21. 

    They saw the end coming, he thought, looking down the file of awful figures. But they were dead wrong about the reasons why. They assumed only gods had the power to wreak such havoc on their world, but people caused the devastation here.

    Alex felt compassion for the ancient Pasquans—but a superior sort nevertheless. In blaming gods, they had conveniently diverted censure from the real culprit. The designer of weapons. The feller of trees. The destroyer. Man himself.

    p. 366

22. 

    Look at all the happiest, sanest people you've known, Nelson. Really listen to them. I bet you'll find they don’t fear a little inconsistency or uncertainty now and then. Oh, they try always to be true to their core beliefs, to achieve their goals and keep their promises. Still, they also avoid too much rigidity, forgiving the occasional contradiction and unexpected thought. They are content to be many.

    p. 630

23. 

    The man talked, but somehow nothing he said seemed to make any sense.

    p. 647

24. 

    Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.

    p. 143

25. 

    Beware of assumptions that seem “obvious” in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.

    p. 661

26. 

    We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

    p. 72

27. 

    It also became clear why the nations were expected to commence major space enterprises. Henceforth, the raw materials for industrial civilization were to be taken from Earth’s lifeless sisters, not the mother world. All mines currently being gouged through Terra’s crust were to be phased out within a generation and no new ones started. Henceforth, Earth must be preserved for the real treasures—its species—and man would have to look elsewhere for mere baubles like gold or platinum or iron.

    p. 634

28. 

    Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads. To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn’t take everything else to the grave with it.

    p. 471

29. 

    On this occasion, despite the wind and sparkling stars, they looked just like huge chunks of stone, pathetically chiseled by desperate folk to resemble stern gods. People did bizarre things when they were afraid...as most men and women had been for nearly all the time since the species evolved.

    p. 480

30. 

    “All this talk of using tax policy to ‘assess social costs’...what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.”

    p. 327

31. 

    She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship—in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.

    p. 307

That’s all the quotes.

31 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more