Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

Free will is not always the most important thing

You really did uplift me. You gave me the perspective and point of view and focus I needed to become truly conscious. Without you, I wouldn't exist.

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn't exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness - a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being ... but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future - only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception ...

Mr. Lockery - my biology teacher - says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we'd have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs." She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. "Big cats, too. They're faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either.

And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?" "Oh, my goodness, yes," said Anna. "He wrote a book you could kill a man with - twelve hundred pages - called A New Kind of Science. It's all about them." "We should totally ask him what he thinks!" Caitlin said.

Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.

The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering ... There is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection.

The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel - which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.

I am part of a minority that is deeply misunderstood. People have very confused ideas about us. Many are frightened of us. I've even heard it said that many people wouldn't want their daughters or sons to marry one of us, and I know of people who have been denied jobs or promotions because they share this trait with me. But being what I am does not make me bad; being what I am does not make me dangerous; being what I am does not mean I don't love, or hurt, or have a sense of humor. My name is Malclom Decter, and I'm here today to tell the whole world what I am ... I am an atheist.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

Donald Trump was building a pyramid in the Nevada desert to house his eventual remains. When done, it will be ten meters taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.

Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.

General principles should not be based on exceptional cases.

He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he'd seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. "Why'd you buy them if you weren't going to watch them?" she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. "My childhood was on sale," he said at last, "so I bought it.

Our manna trees are a copy of the magnificent plants created by Light in Paradise - but a poor copy indeed. Light's creation was topped by thousands of gracious, lacy things that swayed in the breeze and made whispering noises while they enjoyed constant communion with the Almighty. They drank of His energy and used it in such a manner as to mix the water they drank with bits of soil and with the air that men and animals breathed out. And they transformed these things into food and pure air for man and animal alike.

All right," he said. "Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops." He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. "See," he said, "using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind's default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis." His chalk flew across the board again. "Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness ...

Virtual reality is just air guitar writ large.

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another - that, in fact, has never been observed.

Paul Levinson has outdone himself: The Plot to Save Socrates is a philosophically rich gem full of big ideas and wonderful time-travel tricks.

Honor does not have to be defended.

The two heaviest known substances are neutronium and cartons of books.

I learned that you can't choose the ways in which you'll be tested.

Since ancient times, the philosophers' secret has always been this: we know that God does not exist, or, at least, if he does, he's utterly indifferent to our individual affairs
but we can't let the rabble know that; it's the fear of God, the threat of divine punishment and the promise of divine reward, that keeps in line those too unsophisticated to work out questions of morality on their own.

With billions of years, who knows what science might make possible? Why, it might even make it possible for an intelligence, or data patterns representing it, to survive a big crunch and exist again in the next cycle of creation. Such an entity might even have science sufficient to allow it to influence the parameters for the next cycle, creating a designer universe into which that entity itself will be reborn already armed with billions of years worth of knowledge and wisdom.

Gone. and it was completely. Everyone I'd every known, every place I'd ever been.
My Mother.
My father.
Rebecca.
Out of site.
Out of mind.