Ian McDonald Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound.

Ian McDonald
In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK-47s.

Ian McDonald
His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather.

Ian McDonald
He has no belief—faith is beneath his dignity—but he enjoys the designed madness of religion.

Ian McDonald
These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday.

Ian McDonald
How proud he would have felt [...] to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophecies from the barrel of an AK47.

Ian McDonald
It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather.

Ian McDonald
Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress.

Ian McDonald
At some point it will inevitably crash again: as weapons of mass destruction go, unrestricted market economies are among the more subtle but sure.

Ian McDonald
The laws of economics are subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our knowledge of the universe.

Ian McDonald
The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella's fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father's best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime.

Ian McDonald
She knew what she was now. She had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility, for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of liberties within herself.

Ian McDonald
Half your DNA's owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright.

Ian McDonald
"The words still don't move."
"The words don't need to move. It is you who is moved by them."

Ian McDonald
Once muddying subjectivities are removed from the issue, the decision becomes clear.

Ian McDonald
Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.

Ian McDonald
"This is now a matter of national security, sir."
"This is Franz Kafka, is what it is."
Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down.
"He's a Czech writer," Thomas Lull says. "He's been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony."
"Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue."

Ian McDonald
Hey! the people cried in their dreams. Give us back our ghosts! for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?

Ian McDonald
Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.

Ian McDonald
She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials.

Ian McDonald
She had trapped the bird of salvation, sung to it, tamed it and wrung its neck.

Ian McDonald
He's never fought with religion; what is the point of railing against such beauty, such intimate theatre, such chime of eternity? He can treasure it without believing in it.

Ian McDonald
It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution.

Ian McDonald
The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended.

Ian McDonald
Any aeai [A. I., artificial intelligence] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.

Ian McDonald
Economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics.

Ian McDonald
I've always found that the root of a computer problem is human frailty

Ian McDonald
Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years.

Ian McDonald
The elephants fight but the rats go about their business.

Ian McDonald
Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories.

Ian McDonald