Ken MacLeod Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission.

Ken MacLeod
What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible? We're fucked, that's what.

Ken MacLeod
Outer space is, fundamentally, familiar. It's only the night sky, without the earth beneath your feet.

Ken MacLeod
"The uploads replicate and develop relationships. Most of them go very bad. You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God." – Newton's Wake

Ken MacLeod
Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear weapons.

Ken MacLeod
On The Hamburg Cell:
It shows them as weak, alienated individuals being recruited by the classic methods of any campus cult. Young men without a strong sense of self are a Microsoft for mind viruses, and these were no exception.

Ken MacLeod
I take small interest in politics, he said. The subject repels me.

Ken MacLeod
I'm sure they'll come up with all kinds of rationalizations, if the human precedent is anything to go by.

Ken MacLeod
Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least.

Ken MacLeod
When you'd lived long enough, she'd sometimes reflected, when certain habits had become ingrained no matter what refreshment of the neural pathways the immortality genes could bestow, ethics and etiquette became ever less distinct. Hitherto the involuntary equation had read one way, in disproportionate pangs of conscience over a small breach of manners. Now the terms had been inverted, and she felt over the Council majority's horrible, criminal, potentially murderous mistake the sort of acute embarrassment that might have been appropriate for some ghastly faux pas. Dreadfully sorry, I'm such a ditz about these nuclear attack protocols...

Ken MacLeod
It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee.

Ken MacLeod
Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about when your personalities and sexualities were compatible.

Ken MacLeod
It's a big coincidence. It's something we can't explain. But as far as we know that's all it is. And if it isn't, we'll only find out by discovering more facts, not speculating, no matter how logical that speculation might seem. The way to learn the world is to look at the world.

Ken MacLeod
'Naive' is not a word I associate with the Southern Rule. Superstitious, perhaps, traditional, yes, maddeningly set in their way, certainly—but not naive.
I meant you are naive. They must have a hidden motive.
This is why I have no politics, said Darvin. I can't think in those terms.

Ken MacLeod
A faded black T-shirt with a soaring penguin and the slogan 'Where do you want to come from today?'

Ken MacLeod
For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.

Ken MacLeod
She knew about these asteroids, of course. It was because she had classified them in the wrong mental category that she hadn't thought of them.

Ken MacLeod
Anyway... I find what you write interesting.
That's what people usually say when they disagree with it.

Ken MacLeod
If you, dear reader, are looking a this across some great gulf of time and increase of knowledge, spare me your condescension. You too were young once, and ignorant once, and from a future standpoint—perhaps your own—you are young and ignorant still.

Ken MacLeod
All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?

Ken MacLeod
The cover pirated the pictures on the Southern pamphlet and headlined a story whose title, Invasion from Infinity!, bore witness to a brash disdain of doing right as much as of blithe contempt for having been proved wrong.

Ken MacLeod
Darvin listened to the hymn with a mixture of enjoyment of its beauty and disdain of its content.

Ken MacLeod
We're in danger of losing the ship generation.
I'm aware of the problems, she said. 'You can't tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.' Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.

Ken MacLeod
It saddened him that military technology was so much more advanced than he'd ever imagined.

Ken MacLeod