David Brin

But it’s not so hard, learning to picture yourself as part of a great chain. One that began long before you, and will go on long after.

How far do we owe loyalty to our creators’ dream? When have we earned the right to dream for ourselves?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.