162 Quotes by Peter Watts

Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognised four.

I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions.

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.

Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.

Чи є штучним термітник? Боброва загата? Космічний корабель? Звісно. Чи збудовані вони організмами, що природно еволюціонували і діяли природно? Саме так. Тож поясни мені, як що-небудь у всьому величезному мультивсесвіті може бути не природним? [...] Твоє запитання позбавлене сенсу. Витягни вже голову з двадцятого століття.

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.

Nothing's immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups' backups' backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware.

After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.