Vernor Vinge Quotes

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for.

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Les enfants sont des créatures extraordinaires, quand ils ne sont pas simplement chiants.

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All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

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Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.

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The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

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He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

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Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

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Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

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Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

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Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

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Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

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