The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadn’t wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of busines...
The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of...
That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in p...
Tell me how,' Charlotte said, eyes alight with the notion of destroying civilization.
Sometimes I think it's post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away,...
So it’s still New York. People can’t give up on it. It’s what economists used to call the tyranny of sunk costs: once you’ve put so much time and money into a project, it gets hard to just eat your lo...
Scared of her, solicitous of her, in love with her—she had seen all that. And shouting at her furiously for some small treachery, or for nothing at all; she had certainly seen that too. Because he had...
Religion could not be faked or used for worldly purposes.
Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act.
Of course I will like forever any woman who has gone to bed with me, as long as we don’t become a couple and hate each other forever.
Now as Daly said, man-made capital and natural capital are not substitutable. This is obvious, but since most economists say they are substitutable, it has to be insisted on. Put simply, you can't sub...
Not so. You have been doing that quite frequently now. Rest easy. Later the whole of quantum mechanics will be placed in the context of the ten-dimensional manifold of manifolds, and there reconciled...
No, we’re the two old Muppets on the balcony, cracking lame jokes. Lame-ass jokes, says Mutt. I like that. Me too.
No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.
My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity’s great spirit.
Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver.
Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the indivi...
It is fucking crazy to hold on to one moment and say that’s the moment that was pure and sacred, and it can only be like that, and I’ll kill you if you try to change anything.
He had written commentaries for the Journal suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had. Not that they should starve themselves from time to time,...
Guerilla climatology. What do you call that, climatage? Attack meteorology?