The imperial view, a history professor at the Naval Academy once said, is the long view. Individuals build… — James S. A. Corey
The imperial view, a history professor at the Naval Academy once said, is the long view. Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that’s left is the building.
p. 35Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
“You’re not picking a fight with the things that made the protomolecule. You’re picking a fight with whatever killed them. Orders of magnitude above the things that were orders of magnitude above us. You’ve got to know this is going to escalate if we keep using these technologies.”
“We were always going to keep using these technologies. That was inevitable the moment we opened the gates,” Duarte said. “If you’ve studied any history at all, you know that. Never in human history have we discovered something useful and then chosen not to use it.”
p. 548
The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten.
p. 532
He lifted the gun.
“Wait!” Singh said. “Wait. Do you believe all that? About what killing me is supposed to achieve?”
“I am an officer of the Laconian Empire, Governor Singh. I believe what I’m told to believe.”
p. 520
