Ian McDonald Short Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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The elephants fight but the rats go about their business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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