Stephen Baxter Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

It (i. e., agriculture) was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future—even genetic engineering—were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.

Stephen Baxter
On the longest of timescales, over millions of years, the workings of chance defied human intuition. Humans were equipped with a subjective consciousness of risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifespan of less than a century or so. Event that came much less frequently than that—such as asteroid impacts—were place, in human minds, in the category not of rare, but of never. But the impacts happened even so, and to a creature with a lifespan of, say, ten million years, would not have seemed so improbable at all.
Given enough time even such unlikely events as ocean crossings from Africa to South America would inevitably occur, over and again, and would shape the destiny of life.

Stephen Baxter
The rodents' vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.

Stephen Baxter
In the Vortex that lies beyond time and space tumbled a police box that was not a police box.

Stephen Baxter
Life had always been chancy. And now life had found ways of surviving the ultimate extinction event. In new oceans and on strange lands, evolution had begun again.
But it had nothing to do with mankind.

Stephen Baxter
There were other ways for primates to live, other kinds of societies that could be imagined. But once the pattern had been set, it was all but impossible to break.

Stephen Baxter
What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before.

Stephen Baxter
The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren't true was a powerful tool.

Stephen Baxter
We do teach our kids the golden rule - Do as you would be done by.

Stephen Baxter
When you get close enough to someone you're never really alone again.

Stephen Baxter
Bex shrugged. You think anybody's going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.

Stephen Baxter
A growing belief that behind every event lay intention—be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky—was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even the right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.

Stephen Baxter
There was no design in this: no sense of improvement, of purpose. All that was happening was that each organism was struggling to preserve itself, its offspring, and its kin. But as the environment slowly changed, so through relentless selection did the species that inhabited it. It was not a process fueled by life, but by death: the elimination of the less well adapted, the endless culling of inappropriate possibilities. But the potential of an unseen future was no consolation to those who lived through the relentless culling.

Stephen Baxter
A citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility.

Stephen Baxter
As the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.

Stephen Baxter
Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.

Stephen Baxter
Imagine God inside your computer, your phone, everyone else's computer. Imagine someone who almost is the Black Corporation, with all its power and riches and reach. And who, despite all this, seems pretty sane and beneficent by the standards of most gods. Oh, and who sometimes swears in Tibetan...

Stephen Baxter
But even if it is true, even if we are governed by the legacy of an animal past, then it is up to us to behave as if it were not so.

Stephen Baxter
In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.

Stephen Baxter
The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future. Cut loose the past; it is dead weight. Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.

Stephen Baxter
Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna's people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.
But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man's kind.

Stephen Baxter
Anyhow, that's our story. And I think, in my glimpses of the great encompassing mechanism that has shaped us all, I've seen a little of the numinous. That's enough of God for me.

Stephen Baxter
With his eland meat Brow was able to reinforce his political position among the men—and buy access to the women, which was ultimately the only purpose of his endless battle for dominance.

Stephen Baxter
You aren't doing much for morale, Sidewise.
Sidewise shot back, And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what's blindingly obvious all around us.

Stephen Baxter
If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.

Stephen Baxter
For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.

Stephen Baxter