Greg Bear

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...

Having one’s eyes opened doesn’t make one grateful.

Apocalypse could not be repealed by the democratic process.

“That’s insane,” Lanier said.

“Not very. It’s politics.”

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

We are born in ignorance, we die in ignorance, but maybe sometimes we learn something important and pass it along to others before we die. Or we write it down in a little book.

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.

I sometimes think we deserve to die, we’re all so goddamned stupid.

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

Nothing will ever be the same again.

Good! Wonderful! Wasn’t it all badly flawed anyway?

No, perhaps not. Not until now.

“You’re a romantic, aren’t you?” she said.

“I suppose I am.”

“I am too. The silliest people in the world are romantics.”

“Very evocative. He seems to be confirming what I said last year—that the universe really has no underpinnings, that when a good hypothesis comes along, one that explains the prior events, the underpinnings shape themselves to accommodate and a powerful theory is born.”

“Then there is no ultimate reality?”

“Apparently not. Bad hypotheses, those that don’t fit what happen on our level, are rejected by the universe. Good ones, powerful ones, are incorporated.”