Peter Watts quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Peter Watts

Peter Watts Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Peter Watts on Wise Famous Quotes.

The smallest multicorp killed more people than all the sex killers who ever lived, for a fucking profit margin - and the WTO gave them awards for it.

It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

Electrophoresis.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

We're on the bleeding edge of theistic virology here.

We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary.

You can't kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.

I don't understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?

So many things constrain us, from so many directions.

You can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

We are not thinking machines ...

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me
understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

It's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.

But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars.

The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death.

Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her.

We're hard-core realists - we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all.

You're the first person I've seen here who's actually dressed like a monk." "It's a bathrobe.

you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain.

The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

Fhat thouding do're.

Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed.

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. - PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.

Technology implies belligerence.

Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable.

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?

The great thing about making yourself the villain is nobody's likely to contradict you.

You can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language.

You'll just have to imagine

You think there's something bigger than you out there, you f*****g well keep your head down and hope it doesn't notice.

Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind.

We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.

Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognised four.

Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I'm Human again.

Nobody used an industrial vortex engine to run kitchen appliances.

Floaters swarmed through his eyeballs like schools of panicked fish.

Even God can't plan for everything. Too many variables.

The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality.

The longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping.

The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact.

The moved and the shaken.

Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillars.

I was just a tattletale for small minds back home.

The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time.

People have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You

I really wanted to talk to her.
I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.

People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe.

When you're undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable.

Everything's an act. Everything's strategy.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

It's the anthropic principle's evil twin, he thought.

Plus it'll triple your assimilation rate over anything filtered through the senses. Perfect for porn.

Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator.

All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted.

At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there's gonna be wine in the mix at some point.

Cities are the graveyard of Mankind.

[T]hey don't care about realpolitik or the big picture. They only care about monkey-wrenching and whistle blowing.

What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

The static's nice. I could do without the screeching."
"Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

My friend. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she's alone again.

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy.

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES.

Newton's First was a real bitch, not open to negotiation.

never humanize your victims. It shouldn't have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae.

Beowulf's Bane, an exotic glowing fungus that ate the flesh of elves, bore an uncanny resemblance to those of necrotizing fasciitis.

The vampires win every time.

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

What, you stay awake when you exercise? You don't find it, um, boring?

This is it. The final conscious experience. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I know this hasn't been a seamless narrative. I've had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades.

Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.
Further predictions unreliable.

Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort.

Everyone's running from something.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.

Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes.

Everyone's got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn't noticed. He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.

If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist.

God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and His name is Physics.

I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions.

And besides, positing universe as program didn't seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude.

If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me. And

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

By now it's got as much in common with its origins as a humpback whale would have with the sperm cells from a therapsid lizard. Still,

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.