Quotes from Ken MacLeod

The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission.

What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?

All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?

For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.

Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about when your personalities and sexualities were compatible.

I don't really believe in the Devil, but if the Devil is the Father of Lies, then he certainly invented the Internet.

Change the problem by changing your mind.

I knew from the beginning it was hopeless, but it's possible to love without hope.

If you're interested, you'll be there.

For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn't work.

Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear fucking weapons.

Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.

It's elementary chaos theory, or to give it its popular designation—Murphy's Law. Random changes happen all the time. Mistakes accumulate. Correcting them brings further changes. As someone smarter than me once said, evolution is smarter than you.

Orgel's rule—"Evolution is smarter than you

The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission.

Do AIS dream in electric sleep? He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.

As far as I was concerned, the best thing one could do for the poor was to not add one's self to their number.

Shooting arrows at the iron horses of Manifest Destiny.

Whatever the truth about the Deliverer, she will remain in my mind as she was shown on that statue, and all the other statues and murals, songs and stories: riding, at the head of her own swift cavalry, with a growing migration behind her and a decadent, vulnerable, defenceless and rich continent ahead; and, floating bravely above her head and above her army, the black flag on which nothing is written.

She read it over, decided it was too complicated for Memo , and ran it through an app called MyTxt4Dummies.

Green humanism? What's that? Humanism for little green men?

on the one hand faith kids and nature kids and on the other the rest, those you might call, under your breath of course, New Kids? Were these a centimetre taller than others of their age, a glimmer brighter of eye, a syllable more articulate? A step ahead in the race, a pace more sure-footed? A decibel less loud?

But isn't it enough that I just don't want it?" "No," said Fiona. "It isn't enough." "Why not?" "Well, if that was enough, if just saying no and not giving a reason was enough, where would we be? It would just be chaos.

That evening, Hope wrote a letter to her MP, Jack Crow. She found no difficulty at all in composing it, but quite a bit in writing it. She hadn't hand-written an entire page since primary school. In the end she found an app on her glasses that sampled her handwriting and turned it into a font that looked like her handwriting would if it had been regular, and printed it off. There was even an app for the printer that indented the paper a little, and an ink that looked like ballpoint ink.