Efficiency, n. The speed and frictionlessness with which money moves from the poor to the rich.
Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth. said Picasso
Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I a...
The phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite sugges...
The passenger compartment of this one goes right to the moon. The booster stage will come back down after your launch and land right over there. She pointed across the concrete
Doesn’t require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed.
You’re not a conventional man. No! He hooted. I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!—the conventional men get Maya. That i...
Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting? The reason is simpl...
Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment.
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...
We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But t...
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...
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...
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.