The collection / 13 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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13 results · Page 1 of 1Play this collection ▷

01Undated

A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business Schoolfound that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annualincome. -- from "Eugene

Greg Egan / quote

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02Undated

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it feel from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they or their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.

Greg Egan / quote

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03Undated

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports 11 June 2008.

Greg Egan / quote

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04Undated

How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?""That depends.""On what?""On how I want to feel.

Greg Egan / quote

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05Undated

They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.

Greg Egan / quote

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06Undated

There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.

Greg Egan / quote

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07Undated

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

Greg Egan / quote

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08Undated

Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’…as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Greg Egan / quote

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09Undated

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass onthe hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent.

Greg Egan / quote

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10Undated

We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good—for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It’s called ‘moral vanity’.

Greg Egan / quote

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11Undated

Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I’ll live and die in every possible way?

Greg Egan / quote

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12Undated

How’s work?’ Martin asked. Behrouz was now a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which these days seemed to mean as much video journalism as prose. ‘Not bad.’ Behrouz smiled slightly. ‘Business people might be the last paying market left for real news. If they’re convinced that they’re getting fearlessly objective information, they’ll keep shelling out for it – while everyone else gives up caring and buries their head inside their favourite consensual reality.’ Martin laughed softly, self-conscious but grateful for a few words of real conversation, a lifeline out of the pit. ‘You’re not a fan of News Five Point Oh, then?’ ‘Don’t get me started. HigherTribe is worse, but they’re all pathological. What isn’t filtered and spun is just invented out of whole cloth.’ ‘Yeah.’ The replacement of journalism by rumour aggregators and group-think salons was a serious matter, but Martin’s enthusiasm for talking shop was already beginning to falter.

Greg Egan / quote

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13Undated

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

Greg Egan / quote

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