True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter...
Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it. For all the...
Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.
Damn right I voted for him. But if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn't have cast a vote—I’d have cast a brick.
COINCIDENCE You weren't playing attention to the other half of what was going on.
Our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preservin...
It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.
Is our society on the right lines when of of its most gifted people can find no better career than crime unless literally millions per year of public money are lavished on him?
You don’t bother to memorise the literature—you learn to read and keep a shelf of books.
Right! Right! 'Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it's dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can't they be made to stra...
And how many problems have been solved to date?
Is this an unforgivable invasion of privacy? Invasion of privacy it is; unforgivable ...Well, do you believe that justice shall not only be done, but shall be seen to be done? The privacy my worm is d...
Only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.)
The book has one of the scariest mise-en-scènes in all of science fiction: a world that is a smothering, riotous tangle of human arms and limbs. Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics...
It’s the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long...
I don’t think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of occasional dangerous mistakes.
First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we’re going to have the brain race.
The same computers that make it impossible for you to cheat on your income tax can ensure that the blood of your group is in the ambulance that picks you up from a car smash.
A sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can’t keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines.
What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in sp...