Quotes by Vernor Vinge

“All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”

“He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.”

“Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.”

“Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.”

“The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you dont always get what you thought you were asking...”

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.”

“Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.”

“Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, shed revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, andafter it was founded...”

“The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?”

“You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capac...”

“Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.”

“I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.”

“Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.”

“Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.”

“When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen...”

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.”

“But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.”

“I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.”

“Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.”

“Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its posi...”