Once they could talk, the first question was ‘Why did you start this thing?’ and the answer was 'Me?”
One could say the real breakthrough in artificial intelligence was the first time one asked, “What’s in it for me?”
“I’d hate to tell you how much money it is, Bruce–but the chief electron pusher on Pluto is tenth pay grade…and it took him twenty years and a doctor’s degree to get there.”
“It brings in a lot of money, and the drug merchants are none too choosy about the means they’ll adopt to protect their trade. Besides, the stuff has a firm niche in several of the Medusan religions.”
“Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales.”
“It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we’ve learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end.”
Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to the extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life—the ragged edge of starvation.
Hunger of choice is a painful luxury; hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.
“There is no hope of dissuading the Solarians from their chosen course,” she said slowly and distinctly. “The Solarian League, for all its past glories and high achievements, has become an appetite, a voracious hunger, and trillions of its citizens, living safe, satisfied, self-centered, and secure lives on its core worlds, have no concept of what routinely happens to the weak and the helpless along its frontiers.”
“It’s time they found out.”
“Mr. Demwa, it appears that the Sun is haunted.”
The stars were going out.
“The thing’s hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it’s full of stars!”
“Underground, the stars are legend.”
“For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky”
The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.
“There are stars in the earth,” he thought. “If one knew how to see them.”
“I didn’t realize it until now, but I don’t really know anything about them, or what kind of people they are, really. You can’t see inside a person’s heart.”
“Why are humans so touchy about the placement of their souls?”
They say, “The devil made me do it. It wasn’t my fault.” Dream, I never made them do anything.
“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”