- “The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.”
- “Technology could feed dreams of progress or kill dreams of nostalgia”
- “We must be able to endure seeing the truth, but above all we should pass it on to our fellow men and to posterity, whether it be favorable or unfavorable to us.”
- “But this very belief that he could get at the objective truth dates him, marks him as an anachronism.”
- “foolishness went over better in public than gravity”
- “hopes and wishes – was the wound that had left him open to infection”
- “He felt a forgotten wholeness, each part of his self in concord with every other.”
- “A man should try to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”
- “More than anything else, a physiognomy means an understanding of human nature.”
- “The Chinese played with fireworks for hundreds of years without inventing the gun. Edison thought his moving pictures were just toys. The physician who first set out to discover appropriate anesthetic dosages discovered, instead, addiction.”
- “The realities of our past become true only when they interest the present. Then, only, do they become present, known… Only when grief sets in… does the past in fact die.”
- “The advancement of knowledge actually follows quite a different path than the one this cult of personality indicates.”
- “Bluffing works because listeners impose sense of fragments… I am simply the amiable volunteer from the audience, pouring one colorless liquid into another. My conversant is the magician, causing the resultant fluid to shine with the colors of the rainbow.”
- “a massive, comprehensive catalog of people written in the universal language – photography… a meticulous examination of human appearance, personality and social standing, a cross-sampling of representative types”
- “still a boy, he was suddenly struck by how a human invention could stop the fluctuations of nature and make permanent even those qualities as accidental as the shadows of moving clouds”
- “The creation of Belgium by the Great Powers in that year was an experiment in the idea of buffer states: an attempt to keep two fighting dogs apart by dangling a piece of raw meat between them. More remarkable than the idea’s illogic was its success.”
- “kindness ought not to take you more than a mile or so off your path”
- “The fluid, folded age lines in his face came from never knowing when he was being hurt by someone.”
- “The anonymity of an industrial city also allowed him the freedom to do shameful things.”
- “short-sighted people who thought they were on this earth simply to experience pleasure”
- “Innocents always present the most danger.”
- “A man with moral cause stands outside the law.”
- “Every major power has to bloody its hands a bit to lend itself credibility.”
- “Damn” was going to need a lot more time in her mouth before her body stopped rejecting it as a foreign tissue.
- “It was merely his way of giving thanks for the end of another thankless day.”
- “And to admit it, the forgetting made my life less anxious, more comfortable. We’re lucky that our memories are so much less physically persistent than they might be.”
- “He felt very much like the old widower who, fifteen years after the death of his wife, wonders what could be keeping her so long this fine morning.”
- “I would stay up late, and under the influence of black coffee I would fill pages with forced recollections and exercises in concentration.”
- “But the fear generally did the chasing off by itself.”
- “But our business was one that prospered or panicked in proportion to the stock exchange.”
- ‘Trust begets trust; lack of trust begets lack of trust’ Or perhaps it was the other way around.
- “A billion years of evolution eventually, along an increasingly steep curve, produced a species capable of comprehending evolution.”
- “As with free-falling bodies, it seems apparent that such quickening change, whether evolutionary, cultural, or technical, cannot accelerate indefinitely but must reach some terminal velocity. Call the terminal velocity a trigger point, where the rate of change of the system reaches such a level that the system’s underpinning, its ability to change, is changed. Trigger points come about when the progress of a system becomes so accelerated, its tools become so adept at self-replicating and self-modifying, that it trusts an awareness of itself onto itself and reaches the terminal velocity of self-reflection.”
- “(After Darwin) evolution cannot ever follow the old path again. Having reached a trigger point, natural selection re-forms itself as conscious selection.”
- “In the process of psychological adaptation the trigger point came with depth psychology and Freud. Now that our culture is glibly aware of defense mechanisms, the self can never again defend itself in the old ways.”
- “Culture had finally created people who were not only the passive products of but also the active operators and commentators on their own culture’s acceleration.”
- “No longer just a changing culture but a culture of change.”
- “Hyperprogress transmutes, paradoxically, into stillness.”
- “An unthinkable number of individuals – over ten million, if the number means anything – did not make it through the catching up.”
- “No war is inevitable until it breaks out.”
- “Perhaps the dead dictate necessity to the living.”
- “War in this century has been largely a field test for new technologies.”
- “a man asked to be buried with his Ford because it has pulled him out of every hole so far”
- “He hated asking favors of inanimate objects, especially man-made ones.”
- “And for some reason – there are always reasons that reason cannot comprehend.”
- “The office furniture was designed to anticipate all considerations except the human body.”
- “- So, how are things with you? – Pal mal. I mean, I don’t have cancer. And after cancer, what’s the number two killer? Everybody knows it’s boredom. And that only gets me a couple times a week. So, I can’t complain. After all, there’s no known treatment for the big B, is there. Nothing you can do except kill it by overfeeding.”
- “The way our nation’s finest industries are going, more than a few of the big boys came to work on Monday and found their personal belongings in cardboard boxes in the hall.”
- “mastering a satisfying life”
- “He embodies the unsolvable paradox at the heart of modern man.”
- “sustaining the whole thing on a thin, self-supporting tissue of lies, wasn’t it perhaps time… that a plain-sense idealist stepped in and put himself in charge of ending the foolishness?”
- “Those at the front had only death to deal with. The interior lines, on the other hand, had to cope with ‘What if?’.”
~ Richard Powers (‘Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance’)