Dan Simmons - Hyperion (1989)

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Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.

Dan Simmons
A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

Dan Simmons
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

Dan Simmons
The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Dan Simmons
War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

Dan Simmons
Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.

Dan Simmons
Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

Dan Simmons
Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

Dan Simmons
There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

Dan Simmons
Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Dan Simmons
Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

Dan Simmons
A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Dan Simmons
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

Dan Simmons
Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

Dan Simmons
Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

Dan Simmons
Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

Dan Simmons
Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them... they may be forced to die by them.

Dan Simmons
Sometimes... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

Dan Simmons
History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Dan Simmons
In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

Dan Simmons
Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Dan Simmons
Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Dan Simmons
The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

Dan Simmons
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Dan Simmons
Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.

Dan Simmons