(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

One of the laws of nature, Gordon said, is that half the people have got to be below average.For a Gaussian distribution, yeah, Cooper said. Sad, though.

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

If you are losing at a game, change the game.

In a tough situation, don't avoid acting just because it's easier or comfortable. Don't lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.

Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind.

They will do anything for the worker, except become one.

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.

You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.

No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.