When you have a strong conservative streak in your society, Zeyk would say, which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars.
When you have a strong conservative streak in your society, Zeyk would say, which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in...
When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun…. F...
When I'm with you I feel faintly anxious, judged, inadequate. Not the kind of person you like, which I find offensive, and thus behave more like that part of me than ever. Though I want your good opin...
What does it mean to love the past? Each day disappears into nothingness, and we must live every moment of our lives in the present. The present is the whole of reality. But human beings are more than...
We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. Money is thought of as value.
We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only on...
We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.
This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.
They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like al...
They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strange...
They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on...
The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos—toad, newt, frog—even the very words were ugly.
The Minister for Natural Health asked about a stack of extremely slender volumes, and Zhu smiled happily. As a reaction against these endless compendiums, he explained, he had gotten into the habit of...
So they went on being brilliant and accomplished enough to stand out, but normal enough to get along. They were old enough to have learned a great deal, but young enough to endure the physical rigors...
So now as always you could get AAA ratings, not for subprime mortgages, obviously bad, but for submarine mortgages, clearly much better! And the fact that all submarine properties were in some sense e...
So nearly everyone had an opinion. Polls showed that most supported the Russell program, an informal name for Sax’s plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as they could.
Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.
She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted ever...
Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.