Quotes from Douglas E. Richards

So Jim is right, then," said Kelly. "You aren't really caretakers at all. You just let happen what is destined to happen.

Wiring this much money into Kathy's account, when she hadn't even given him routing numbers, was his way of showing off. His way of getting Allie's attention.

We could do as you suggest. We could coerce civilizations. Actively mold them. But our creator doesn't believe this is our place. Our creator believes in the principal of self-determination. Of choice—free will.

The room fell silent as everyone considered what living under the rule of an unstable genius might be like. "Would

Oh Lord, it's hard to be humble, When you're perfect in every way. I can't wait to look in the mirror, Cause I get better looking each day. To know me is to love me. I must be a hell of a man. Oh Lord it's hard to be humble, But I'm doing the best that I can.

Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

Sometimes there are no good decisions, only impossible ones. Which doesn't—necessarily—make those forced to make these decisions evil.

The most important environmental determinants that come into play are the quality of relationships with friends and family. And challenging ourselves, pursuing what we are passionate about, and achieving. What really makes a life rewarding is facing challenges, overcoming them, and growing as a person.

So a patent is a pact between an inventor and society," continued Altschuler. "In exchange for twenty years of exclusive use of an invention, the inventor is required to disclose the invention publicly, in writing. In enough detail so that others can duplicate it. And build upon it. You can still choose to keep an invention a trade secret, of course, but if you do, you don't get protection. You basically take your chances that competitors won't learn your secret.

And innocent people who feel threatened hire bodyguards. Guilty people hire mercenaries.

Perhaps one sentence summed it up best, "The United States and China are locked in a cold tech war, and the winner will end up dominating the twenty-first century.

I accessed one of the emergency supplies of nanites I had hidden, thanking God that I had taken this precaution

In a politically correct university culture packed with too many spoiled rich kids complaining of micro-aggressions, parsing every word and statement for any hint it might give offense, no matter how convoluted the logic behind it, desperately needing to separate the world into victimizers and victims. People with so much time on their hands, and so few actual struggles, that the brush of a metaphoric butterfly wing would send them howling in outrage.

the great pioneer of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, who had said, "We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough.

A war for technology supremacy.

In each of us there is another whom we do not know." —Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology

you didn't know what you didn't know, you could fool yourself pretty easily.

What's more likely, that someone found a way to hack this unhackable system? Or that Isaac Jordan willingly killed thousands of people?

This is classic data mining. You draw a conclusion and then mine the data retrospectively to find support for it. You invariably do.

A hare so dominant that it actively helped the tortoise catch up, not knowing the tortoise would repay this kindness by kneecapping the hare and bursting into the lead.

Politicians take money from the citizenry, funnel much of it to themselves and their friends, and then use the rest of it to buy votes and to grow their power—which involves bigger and bigger government. Once a bureau is created it is never destroyed—like a malignant cancer. And government never invents the next great computer. Never produces. Only consumes." Alyssa

Runaway biological or electronic evolution that led to a singularity event.

Anyway, Hitler believed that the bigger the lie, the more audacious, the more likely it was to be believed. Because who'd imagine someone would have the nerve to spread such a colossal lie? And the more such a lie was repeated, the more likely it would be accepted as truth." Kelly paused. "But I need to stop talking now and let you think.

You step onto the Enterprise's transporter pad. Your information, your pattern, is scanned into a computer. And then you're destroyed, basically melted down. And a second later a copy of you is reconstituted on the planet below.