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Ken MacLeod QUOTES

Ken MacLeod QUOTES

1 " The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

2 " You must rely on reason and science,” she said, “and be guided by a likewise rational ethic of human concern. You must do your utmost as individuals to improve your understanding, ability and compassion. "

― Ken MacLeod , Descent

3 " English is so past,’ she said. ‘Sure, we need people who can write about what we do, but they don’t have to be English graduates. Theology graduates who don’t believe any of it – that would be useful. "

― Ken MacLeod , Descent

4 " That there was no God was a given, as far as Hope was concerned, and being nice to people and making the most of your life struck her as a reasonable enough conclusion to draw from it, and in any case what she wanted to do. But besides the spires of theology and the watch-towers of ideology, it seemed a very shaky hut indeed, and not one that offered her much shelter or would stand up in court.
She couldn't see a way to make her objection to the fix a deduction from any body of thought. It came from a body of flesh, her own, and that was enough for her. She doubted that this would be enough for anyone else. "

― Ken MacLeod , Intrusion

5 " I was overcome by a wave of wonder at how much good was going on, and how you heard about the bad things that happened so much that you overlooked the immensely disproportionate majority of other acts done to the real benefit of self and others without which none of this would be here at all. "

― Ken MacLeod , Descent

6 " On this rock we had built our church. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Cassini Division

7 " 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. "

― Ken MacLeod , Descent

8 " Change the problem by changing your mind. "

― Ken MacLeod , Intrusion

9 " 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. "

― Ken MacLeod , Intrusion

10 " David Reid and Myra Godwin are talking after the funeral of her ex-husband in Alma-Ta. Reid was an old lover of Myra:
"There was still a genuine affection between them, attenuated though it was by the years, exasperated though it was by their antagonism. Reid had neer been a man to let enmity get in the way of friendship. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Sky Road (The Fall Revolution, #4)

11 " There’s a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy. "

― Ken MacLeod , Descent

12 " The eighties?’ I said. ‘As in, the nineteen-eighties? The decade that taste forgot? Honest, Sophie, ask your granny. Ask mine, if you like. She’ll tell you the only good thing about it was that the internet and phone cameras weren’t invented, well hardly anyway, so most of the awful photos are lying out of sight in drawers and shoeboxes. "

― Ken MacLeod , Descent

13 " Conscious of each other’s subjectivity in a direct and immediate way, they experienced no conflict between resolute solidarity and riotous individuality: they were indeed an association in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

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

― Ken MacLeod , Cosmonaut Keep (Engines Of Light, #1)

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

― Ken MacLeod

16 " 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. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction

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

― Ken MacLeod , Cosmonaut Keep (Engines Of Light, #1)

18 " Shooting arrows at the iron horses of Manifest Destiny. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Cassini Division

19 " 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. "

― Ken MacLeod , The Sky Road (The Fall Revolution, #4)

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

― Ken MacLeod , Intrusion