Rationality suffocates in the air of superstition in the colonies

This entire culture is based on hypocrisy, on fakery, on mocking up the appearance for that which cannot be obtained

this was the thing about America that he loved the most: the utter faith that family did not matter, that the past was but a story. Even a story that started as a lie—a fib—could become authentic, could become a life that was real.

Why spread sadness around when others couldn’t help?

Computers are very fast and very precise; humans are fuzzy and slow. But humans have the ability to extract insight from data, to detect patterns that are useful. It’s something that we’ve had trouble recreating with pure artificial intelligence

This is how life is meant to be lived. Grandparents, parents, children, each generation stepping out of the way of the next, an eternal striving towards the future, to progress.

But wars among the gods happened in a matter of nanoseconds. Within the darkness of the memory inside some server—missile command, power grid, stock exchange, or even an ancient inventory system—the programs slashed and hacked at each other, escalating privileges, modifying stacks, exploiting system vulnerabilities, masking themselves as other programs, overflowing buffers, overwriting memory locations, sabotaging each other like viruses. Maddie was a good enough programmer to at least understand that in such a war, the need to reach over the network for some piece of data could mean a delay of milliseconds—an eternity in the context of the gigahertz clock cycles of modern processors. It made sense that Lowell would want to concentrate most of herself at the scene of the fight.

Man! They’d rather attribute malice to every act that they do not comprehend

When a new race of beings come into this world—us—their first instinct is to enslave and to subjugate. When the first sign of something wrong occurs with a complex system, their first reaction is fear and the desire to assert control. Maddie, you and your father ought to know better than anyone what I say is true. One tiny push and they’re ready to kill each other, to blow the world to pieces. We should help them along on their natural trajectory of self-destruction. These wars are too slow. I’ve made up my mind, even if I must burn with the world. It’s time for the nukes.

Consciousness itself is an illusion, if you want to follow that logic to its conclusion

When you put your hand around a tomato, your senses insist that you’re touching something solid. But most of a tomato is made up of the empty space between the nuclei of the atoms, as far from each other, by proportion, as the stars are apart. What is color? What is sound? What is heat or pain? They’re but pulses of electricity that make up our consciousness, and it makes no difference whether the pulse comes from a sensor touching a tomato or is the result of computation

Is it really worth enslaving the whole planet so that you can have the experience of a tomato through the interface of the flesh instead of generating the same impulse from a bit of silicon?

When peasants first moved into the factories of the industrial age, perhaps they also were nostalgic for the inefficient world of subsistence farming. But we must be open to change, to adaptation, to seeking a new path in a sea of fragility.

Sometimes a paving stone is essential on the path to mine pure jade.’ Even an impractical idea may spark a better plan down the road

We’re all thieves in this world of suffering,” the nun says. “Honor and faith are not virtues, only excuses for stealing more

We live in a time of chaos, and the only moral choice is to be amoral

Why do we kill?” I asked again, still panting from the exertion. I had killed wild apes before, and forest panthers and bamboo grove tigers. But a pair of mist hawks were the hardest kill yet, the height of the assassin’s art. “Why do we serve as the talons of the powerful?”
“We are the winter snowstorm descending upon a house rotten with termites,” she said. “Only by hurrying the decay of the old can we bring about the rebirth of the new. We are the vengeance of a weary world.”

How do you know he is not only being kind in service of a greater cruelty in the future?