Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.
People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.
Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
This was what the loss of civilization really meant. For the first time the full impact of the Galaxy’s great loss overwhelmed her. So long as she could see those lost worlds she might hope to win them back, but to be struck blind like this was to lose them forever. She knew a sudden agony of homesickness for all the planets she might never see again, a sudden terrible nostalgia for the lost, familiar worlds, for the fathomless seas of space between them.
“The view is still amazing”
“All I see are the bright lights of a billion places i’ll never go.”
“If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”
And then, suddenly, an extraordinary question rose in my mind, whether this stupendous globe of green fire might not be the vast Central Sun—the great sun, round which our universe and countless others revolve. I felt confused. I thought of the probable end of the dead sun, and another suggestion came, dumbly—Do the dead stars make the Green Sun their grave? The idea appealed to me with no sense of grotesqueness; but rather as something both possible and probable.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
“They had forgotten much, but they did not know it. They were as perfectly fitted to their environment as it was to them—for both had been designed together. What was beyond the walls of the city was no concern of theirs; it was something that had been shut out of their minds. Diaspar was all that existed, all that they needed, all that they could imagine. It mattered nothing to them that Man had once possessed the stars.”
The computer is programmed to maintain the community. Individuals had to be sacrificed for the good of the whole. Only each time someone disappeared, no one noticed because all memory of them was erased. Please.
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all - no one’s around to write horror stories.
On April 10, 2912, my late husband and I set off down Fifth Avenue aboard the Land Titanic, the largest street-going vessel ever built. Just four days into her maiden voyage, as we approached 32 Street, the line-liner struck a mailbox and went down. 2000 souls were lost that day, including my dear husband. In loving memory, I established the Mr. Astor Endowment, which this year supports the United Mutant Scholarship Fund.
Alien technology and human stupidity–an unbeatable combination.
If you’re the best that the Earth has got to offer, it’s time we bend over and get a tentacle right up the ass.
“To my way of thinking, it’d take an uncommonly stupid flag officer, even for a Solly, to make that kind of assumption,” Oversteegen replied.
“And what, may I ask, have the Sollies done lately to make you think they haven’t hand-picked the flag officers out here for stupidity?” Michelle asked tartly.
“Nothing,” he conceded disgustedly. “It just offends my sense of the’ way things are supposed to be, I suppose. I’d expect better thinking than that out of a plate of cottage cheese!”
And if you insist on continuing to make assumptions about my character, I’ll advise you only this: assume you will always be wrong.
Fry: Uh, just so we’ll know, who’s the enemy?
Captain Zapp Brannigan: A valid question! We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like. But we can assume this. They stand for everything we don’t stand for. Also they told me you guys look like dorks.
Bender: They look like dorks!
“Then we’ll f****** remove you from command and put someone with some guts into it!” Abruzzi snarled. “And then we’ll put you in front of a frigging court-martial and shoot your sorry ass for cowardice in the face of the enemy!”
“That’s your option,” Kingsford said. “And if that’s what you want to do, you go right ahead. But you’re not going to find another admiral who will do what you want. The Navy’s done dying just because the lot of you have been too damned stupid and too damned arrogant to listen to the people who have been trying to get you to stop this goddamned war you started—you, not them—since before it even began!”
I was on a dead ship on an unknown planet with three trainees freshly graduated into the Imperial Service. I tried to look on the bright side.
Tom kept his head averted, and so was spared blindness as the destroyer began firing actinic beams of antimatter at its assailant.
“Now if this thing of mine works, and we can get close, real close, and bombard that bird’s anti-matter energy shield with a stream of mesic atoms, I think we can destroy that shield. The bird would be defenseless then except for beak, claws, and wings. You could hit it with everything but the kitchen sink.”
“We’ve got kitchen sinks to spare, son!”