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Ian McDonald quotes
He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound.
Ian McDonald
This is now a matter of national security, sir." "This is Franz Kafka, is what it is." Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down. "He's a Czech writer," Thomas Lull says. "He's been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony." "Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue.
Ian McDonald
I've always found that the root of a computer problem is human frailty.
Ian McDonald
The elephants fight but the rats go about their business.
Ian McDonald
The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella's fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father's best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime.
Ian McDonald
It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather.
Ian McDonald
She had trapped the bird of salvation, sung to it, tamed it and wrung its neck.
Ian McDonald
The laws of economics are subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our knowledge of the universe.
Ian McDonald
Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years.
Ian McDonald
Any aeai [A. I., artificial intelligence ] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.
Ian McDonald
Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair.
Ian McDonald
She knew what she was now. She had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility, for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of liberties within herself.
Ian McDonald
Economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics.
Ian McDonald
How proud he would have felt [...] to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophecies from the barrel of an AK47.
Ian McDonald
A chilly piety leaked into the air.
Ian McDonald
It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution.
Ian McDonald
Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant.
Ian McDonald
She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials.
Ian McDonald
The words still don't move." "The words don't need to move. It is you who is moved by them.
Ian McDonald
Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories.
Ian McDonald
The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended.
Ian McDonald
He has no belief-faith is beneath his dignity-but he enjoys the designed madness of religion.
Ian McDonald
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