Looking around the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving--beating very lightly--a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standi...
It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century’s war dead.
If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by th...
I must trust my spacesuit not to fail. And i must remember, if i can, that really we are always in a spacesuit of one sort or another. We just don't usually see it so clearly.
Henry Ford was afraid that the amount of dirt that was being removed to make room for the foundation of the Empire State Building was so great that it would have a disastrous effect on the rotation of...
He was a fool. Annoying, as fools are. But there are always fools, Freya. People like him will always exist, and they don’t matter. Don’t you see? They just don’t matter. Fools will always be with us....
Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth.
Becoming a shaman is a fate that can strike anyone. Even you.
Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.
A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well - most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock Januar...
The way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes—what a coincidence!—and indeed it’s another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure...
First a wind ensemble playing a transcription of the Appassionata piano sonata; then Beethoven’s opus 134, which was his own transcription for two pianos of his Grosse Fugue for string quartet, opus 1...
Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.
Wisdom is always wont to arrive late, and to be a little approximate on first possession. supposed Francis Spufford
What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually beg...
We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth.
We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.
We should think of Earth as our sun. We all revolve around it, and it exerts a huge drag on us.
We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money.
To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one centre of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalitie...