Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.
They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring [it] to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of hist...
There is no such thing as purity. It’s an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous.
That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
One sequence of these diary notes had lasted longer than most, and by their content he saw that they came from the time right after his father had died. One line stuck him like a thorn:Alone in the ho...
I prefer to call it fiscal decapitation.
Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance.
Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.
But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness.
And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal univer...
All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.
You can only kill disappointment with a new try.
Who programmed this thing?
What we need is equality without conformity.
This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignor...
So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global b...
Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than...
Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
Mozart’s pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. ‘...
It grew in the dark, it’s a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No