Quotes from Peter Watts

Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed.

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.

It's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat?

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

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.

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.

What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

Technology implies belligerence.

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

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it.

I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain.