Quotes from Peter Watts

no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language.

Fifty percent of all medical personnel graduate in the bottom half of their class.

Fhat thouding do're.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.

there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all survival strategy

Turns out that when something gets cheaper, or more efficient, we just end up using so much more of the stuff that the savings disappear under a wave of increased consumption. They call it the "Jevons Paradox"

Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable, you

If you did things because you were evil, you were in real trouble. If you did the same things because you were sick, though, the doctors would sometimes cover for you. Fischer had learned to be sick.

down had started to climb the walls.

Plus it'll triple your assimilation rate over anything filtered through the senses. Perfect for porn.

Nobody used an industrial vortex engine to run kitchen appliances.

and besides, positing universe as program didn't seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude.

Advertising tries to knock out your critical thinking by definition. Every tasteless anti-abortion poster, every unfailing-cute child suffering from bowel disease in the local bus shelter, every cartoon bear doing unnatural things with toilet paper is an attempt to rewire your synapses, to literally change your mind.

Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition.

YOU CANNOT PREVENT AND PREPARE FOR WAR AT THE SAME TIME —Albert Einstein

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy.

THE LORD WILL TAKE CONTROL OF YOU. YOU WILL DANCE AND SHOUT AND BECOME A DIFFERENT PERSON. —1 Samuel 10:6

we're hard-core realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

protocadherin

GRUNTS LOOK THE ENEMY IN THE EYE. GRUNTS KNOW THE STAKES. GRUNTS KNOW THE PRICE OF POOR STRATEGY. WHAT DO THE GENERALS KNOW? OVERLAYS AND TACTICAL PLOTS. THE WHOLE CHAIN OF COMMAND IS UPSIDE-DOWN. –KENNETH LUBIN, ZERO SUM

Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn't diminish the point of exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.

I mean, Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting. Maybe whatever's out here doesn't even use it.

Floaters swarmed through his eyeballs like schools of panicked fish.