64 Quotes by Ada Palmer

Ah, reader, I understand it is your kindness which fills you with this hubris, but it is hubris still. You presume, not only to advise your Maker, but to demand that He respond to your advice by revising the infinite and perfect Plan of His Creation precisely as you--with your flawed and finite wisdom--recommend?

It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark.

Mr. Smith is a banker, Mrs. Christian is a nurse, as if those twenty or forty or sixty hours made the other hundred of each week nothing. How do you introduce yourself at parties, reader? Are you a cook? A hiker? A reader? A moviegoer?

A brothel?” Madame chuckled at Carlyle’s timidity. “You mustn’t be scared of the word. I usually call it a Gendered Sex Club. I offer archaic sex, with old-fashioned gender-differentiated men and women. My clients like to seduce or be seduced, and enjoy skirts and breeches, rather than the neutered egalitarian copulation one gets outside nowadays.

Some things should not be said while on one’s knees.

Predators need the right to tear out each other’s throats.

Histories say scared Majorities hurt Minorities. That’s why you hide. Utopia pretends ut because they’re openly giving Implants to U-beasts they aren’t secretly giving them to humans too, and you pretend ut because you don’t make Set-Sets anymore you aren’t making other, stranger Things. They make U-Beast Jokes to make Others forget Mars will be real; you make Number Puzzles to make Others forget your Machine-Brain-Copy will be real too.

Legend says that Emperor Constantine, converted on his deathbed, willed the Roman Empire to the Christian Church, and in one act both ensured that Church’s immortality and doomed Europe to nineteen centuries of wars for God;.

Apollo thought that we need suffering to create people capable of enduring suffering. World Peace does not breed heroes.