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On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox.. Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past. .Unknown
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We all know interspecies romance is weird.Tim Burton
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I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.Mindy Kaling
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Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?Douglas Adams
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Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.Douglas Adams
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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.Douglas Adams
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My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.Douglas Adams
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Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.Spider Robinson
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Why do humans never do as they're told? Someone should replace you all with robots. No, on second though, they shouldn't, bad idea.Unknown
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Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.Bernard Beckett
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It's impossible to walk through solid rock... You have to walk between the molecules that make up the rock.J.M. Dattilo
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When the mind is free, magic happens.C.G. Rousing
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Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you? .Iain Banks
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I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.Olaf Stapledon
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A.I. might be straight out of science fiction, but it's going to turn into man's worst nightmare.Anthony T. Hincks
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Science Fiction: Any scientific acclaim that omits God.Johnny Hart
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..I don't believe in Him, and if He does exist, I don't like Him. His type of gods aren't gods who echo how mortals behave. They're gods who are held up as example of perfection to be emulated. They're not gods of the people. They're remote and inaccessible, they demand blind, unthinking obedience from their followers. They're dictators. We Aesir and Vanir, by contrast, are mirrors. Other gods rule. We reflect and magnify. We are you, only more so. We share your flaws and foibles. We are as humanlike as we are divine, and I think we are all the better for that.James Lovegrove
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Knowledge is like an endless resource; a well of water that satisfies the innate thirst of the growing human soul. Therefore never stop learning... because the day you do, you will also stop maturing.Chidi Okonkwo
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The seeking of a mate shall be undertaken with due preparation and care. A life-bond should never be contemplated as a light thing--unlike a legal union or sanctified joining, the sealing of souls CANNOT be severed. When a mate is SOULBOUND to another-- L I F E M A T E D, as some have come to regard it--a mystery is engaged. In one aspect mystical, the lifemating process is the most sublime endeavor that a Refarian may assume. Once formed, the bond must be ever cherished and nurtured by the process of lifelong rigor.Deidre Knight
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All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.Nathan Reese Maher
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So is this being in love? I stay with the moment, waiting to find out, the space between us fluctuating with uncertainty. The only thing I am sure of is that each time his lips leave mine they are right back again.Kea Alwang
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Never let other people bring you down let Jesus be the one who brings you down, because he knows what he is doingSkye Daphne
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In case you haven't noticed, they're moving a lot faster. I don't know about the laws of physics on your planet, but where I come from an object moving at subclass speed can't catch up to one running at starclass. But if you know something about turbines, thrusters and engines, quantum or classical physics that I've somehow missed, then please enlighten me.- Caillen Dagan to Desideria DenariiSherrilyn Kenyon
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Gabrielle chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling. “So he’s been after you, has he? Poor Etta, pursued by a sun priest offering to pleasure–” “Every nook and cranny, ” Marietta interrupted dryly and Gabrielle tipped her head back with a throaty laugh.Michelle OLeary
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She paused and saw him tense in expectation. He wouldn’t like to hear this, but better from her than one of the others. “You aren’t the only pilot I have in my service. And you aren’t the only person with a dark past, though the illegal things that you did, you were forced to do by the Core. But I will tell you what I’ve told the others. This is your last chance. You screw up with me and you get shipped up river. I don’t offer second chances– I offer last chances.” Nope, he didn’t like it. She saw the hand not holding the bottle of beer curl into a fist. Sin and Del, from Sunscapes Trilogy, Book 1: Last Chance.Michelle OLeary
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The first rule in the book of love is acceptance.Destinee Hardwick
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Maligned —powerfully-drawn characters acting out a disturbing view of our future.” -David Compton, New York Times Best-Selling authorKathleen Papajohn
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Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils.Rick Barnett
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The features of character are carved out of adversity.Rick Barnett
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Uh-oh, big boy. Your blood is in the water and the sharks are circling. Must be feeding time."-- Mea Brin, The HuntressMichelle OLeary
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Fantasy novels reveal “emergency escape routes” from reality. Romance novels dish out a banquet of Eye Candy. Otherworldly passion erupts when the two collide in an epic novel of unforgettable characters and dire circumstances.Sarah J. Pepper
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We all change, when you think about it. We are all different people, all through our lives. And that's ok, that's good, you gotta keep moving so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.-- Doctor Who! ( 11- Doctor)Doctor Who
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Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.Forrest J. Ackerman
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We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.Rick Yancey
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Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her. .Unknown
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Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.Clifford D. Simak
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Where have all the Fembots gone?Ren Garcia
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When you find a truth that surpasses your desire to fit trends and meet approval, you can be certain it’s worth fighting to spread.Caroline George
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The truth is crazier than lies because lies are required to stick to possibilities–the truth isn’t.Caroline George
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She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.Kamand Kojouri
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[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!Terry Pratchett
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A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.Frederik Pohl
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If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.Jane Espenson
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Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.Anthony Burgess
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In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.Geoff Ryman
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A writer is very much like the captain on a star ship facing the unknown. When you face the blank page and you have no idea where you're going. It can be terrifying, but it can also be the adventure of a lifetime.Michael Piller
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I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” — Associated Press interview, 12-7-11Walter Mosley
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...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.Unknown
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Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words — if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night — do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match? .C.J. Cherryh
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Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.Ted Chiang
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I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation.Chris Dee
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What is more precious: a thousand answers derived from one question? Or, one answer…from a thousand questions?G.F. Smith
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We’re moving faster with our science and technology than our morals are evolving, we’re going to have to live in the future we create so it is up to us to become responsible for what we’re creating. It is the only way to avoid the probable catastrophes that will face us and our children on the way. We all have to get on the same page if we’re to unify and a species and survive. I hope ‘The Vision Quest’ will help people set positive intentions for their lives and the world we live in, as well as give them some tools to manifest them.Deborah M. Pratt
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When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.Frank Herbert
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Technos and clerics have much in common. Both take a world that can’t be fully understood and try to explain its fundamental properties. Clerics postulate beliefs that can never be proven; they demand you accept these postulates as your Faith, which will guide your actions and thoughts. It’s a top down way of thinking; start with the big picture and derive rules for living. Fundamental knowledge is static. Even the derived rules rarely change. Technos work from the bottom up. They build a baseline of observations and formulate theories to explain these phenomena. Nothing is sacred; with new observations, theories are discarded or modified to fit the facts. Technos and clerics; how could they not be in conflict? Dan Ronco’s Diary, 2016.Dan Ronco
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All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.Frank Herbert
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The will of God or the lunacy of man - it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things. Or, alternatively (and he thought of it as he contemplated the small orderliness of the cabin against the window background of such frantic natural scenery), the will of man and the lunacy of God.James Hilton
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Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again. But their sincerity and sweetness, their sharing an instant in a fleeting life. It was almost as if a secret had passed between them. Was this some kind of love? I wanted to follow them, to touch them, to tell them of my happiness. I wanted to whisper to them: 'This is it. This is it'".Alan Lightman
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The assumption of no God cannot be proven by science." - Scientific Faith"Under the Thelián Sky: Beyond the Great Unknown" (c) 2012Frank Olvera
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Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.Rick Yancey
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Improving intelligence is possible, but it is more likely to occur if children are given the right experiences at the right ages.Dennis Garlick
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May the Code replicate eternal.Amanda Orneck
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If you feel like you don't fit into the world you inherited it is because you were born to help create a new one.Ross Caligiuri
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To completely understand me you must first accept that I am not you.Ross Caligiuri
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My dream is to create something so beautiful that it encourages people to present the best version of themselves to me everywhere I go.Ross Caligiuri
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Eternity will not cause our memories to fade, it will force our hearts to accept the past.Ross Caligiuri
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To struggle against the weight of sleep as reality eclipses the moon of your dreams is the purest sign of true love.Ross Caligiuri
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Cherish your existence, for memories become legacies and life can change in an instant.Ross Caligiuri
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Try to think of it as though we are rewriting history——the first time this experience occurred you and I never kissed in this Dream Machine room. But now when we leave here, and open our eyes again near the wall around the center of Constance, that kiss will be included in our memories of the day we first met. We could spend a lifetime recreating this moment here, meanwhile, not a single second of our lives would slip by back in our reality. Time seems to move differently inside of our memories. .Ross Caligiuri
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As her feet beat the concrete ground beneath them, her chest began to ache. It had been a long time since she had run at a full sprint. She was, quite literally, running for her life, and leaving everything she had known before behind. Regardless of her past experiences, here she was, blindly following a girl, who was virtually a stranger, because she had promised to lead Eleanor to safety.Ross Caligiuri
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Eleanor had heard talk of the rebellion that existed inside the city of Constance before. Most of the information she gathered was considered an old fairy tale by the general public. There were a few stories here and there about people angered by their present living conditions, who had demanded that the center of Constance be held responsible for it. However, information was never passed between the five different sectors. Over the years the tales of the rebellion had become children’s bedtime stories, and people did not take them seriously.Ross Caligiuri
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Here we go, ” Phoenix said, turning back to Nora. “Try not to let this room scare you.Ross Caligiuri
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Every decision you make in life will stem from one of two options: love or fear. Choose love.Ross Caligiuri
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Knowing all the languages in the world could help you to really understand all the jokes you can hear... from my future Kids' Funny Business.Ivan Stoikov
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Coloron often pondered how a race, in which the stupid seemed more inclined to breed, had managed to come this far, and why human intelligence persisted–a discussion point in the nature vs nurture debate which had not died in half a millennium.Neal Asher
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I had aimed at Mars and was about to hit Venus unquestionably the all-time cosmic record for poor shots.Edgar Rice Burroughs
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How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth, " when it is clearly "Ocean.Arthur C. Clarke
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These are lines from my asteroid-impact novel, Regolith:Just because there are no laws against stupidity doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be punished. I haven’t faced rejection this brutal since I was single. He smelled trouble like a fart in the shower. If this was a kiss of gratitude, then she must have been very grateful. Not since Bush and Cheney have so few spent so much so fast for so long for so little. As a nympho for mind-fucks, Lisa took to politics like a pig to mud. She began paying men compliments as if she expected a receipt. Like the Aerosmith song, his get-up-and-go just got-up-and-went. “You couldn’t beat the crap out of a dirty diaper! ” He embraced his only daughter as if she was deploying to Iraq.She was hotter than a Class 4 solar flare! If sex was a weapon, then Monique possessed WMDI haven’t felt this alive since I lost my virginity. He once read that 95% of women fake organism, and the rest are gay. Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but ugly is universal. Why do wives fart, but not girlfriends? Adultery is sex that is wrong, but not necessarily bad. The dinosaurs stayed drugged out, drooling like Jonas Brothers fans. Silence filled the room like tear gas. The told him a fraction of the truth and hoped it would take just a fraction of the time. Happiness is the best cosmetic, He was a whale of a catch, and there were a lot of fish in the sea eager to nibble on his bait. Cheap hookers are less buck for the bang, Men cannot fall in love with women they don’t find attractive, and women cannot fall in love with men they do not respect. During sex, men want feedback while women expect mind-reading. Cooper looked like a cow about to be tipped over. His father warned him to never do anything he couldn’t justify on Oprah. The poor are not free -- they’re just not enslaved. Only those with money are free. Sperm wasn’t something he would choose on a menu, but it still tasted better than asparagus. The crater looked alive, like Godzilla was about to leap out and mess up Tokyo. Bush follows the Bible until it gets to Jesus. When Bush talks to God, it’s prayer; when God talks to Bush, it’s policy. Cheney called the new Miss America a traitor — apparently she wished for world peace. Cheney was so unpopular that Bush almost replaced him when running for re-election, changing his campaign slogan to, ‘Ain’t Got Dick.’ Bush fought a war on poverty — and the poor lost. Bush thinks we should strengthen the dollar by making it two-ply. Hurricane Katrina got rid of so many Democratic voters that Republicans have started calling her Kathleen Harris. America and Iraq fought a war and Iran won. Bush hasn’t choked this much since his last pretzel. Some wars are unpopular; the rest are victorious. So many conservatives hate the GOP that they are thinking of changing their name to the Dixie Chicks. If Saddam had any WMD, he would have used them when we invaded. If Bush had any brains, he would have used them when we invaded. It’s hard for Bush to win hearts and minds since he has neither. In Iraq, you are a coward if you leave and a fool if you stay. Bush believes it’s not a sin to kill Muslims since they are going to Hell anyway. And, with Bush’s help, soon. In Iraq, those who make their constitution subservient to their religion are called Muslims. In America they’re called Republicans. With great power comes great responsibility — unless you’re Republican. .Brent Reilly
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Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today – the age of science – science fiction is our mythology. .Michael Shermer
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I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.S.J. Perelman
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Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. CampbellArthur C. Clarke
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Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.Freeman Dyson
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The "paranormal" is what we call a phenomenon when examined through the narrow lens of what we consider "normal." You have to transcend the senses to understand them.Alan Joshua
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A recent survey of 2, 000 male graduates of Harvard Business Schoolfound that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annualincome. -- from "EugeneGreg Egan
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He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour. Several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim's DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.Kim Stanley Robinson
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All unnatural control systems have a key element in their intricate composition — the fatality that they will naturally collapse.Robert Neil Fleischer
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Nothing will stop us from stealing our place in the sun. - The Founder from Lost in AtlantisBriton Heitt
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I gazed at these marvels in profound silence. Words were utterly wanting to indicate the sensations of wonder I experienced. I seemed, as I stood upon that mysterious shore, as if I were some wandering inhabitant of a distant planet, present for the first time at the spectacle of some terrestrial phenomena belonging to another existence. To give body and existence to such new sensations would have required the coinage of new words - and here my feeble brain found itself wholly at fault. I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear! .Jules Verne
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Degree of conformance to our other beliefs. One of our criteria for the assessment of explanations is coherence with our existing beliefs.Michael E Emmering
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The most important rule when assessing abductive arguments is to consider alternative explanations. When we are presented with an explanation that sounds plausible, too often we simply accept it without noticing that there are other possible explanations that are equally plausible or more plausible.Michael E Emmering
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It illuminated a vision Dante could not have imagined in his wildest nightmares, nor Poe in the grasp of an uncontrollable delirium.Alan Dean Foster
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It suddenly occurred to me just how absurd this scene was: a guy wearing a suit of armor, standing next to an undead king, both hunched over the controls of a classic arcade game. It was the sort of surreal image you'd expect to see on the cover of an old issue of Heavy Metal or Dragon magazine.Ernest Cline
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Let's see if I got this right, " she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.Carl Sagan
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Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.Carl Sagan
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The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.Charles Stross
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Science is the desperate effort to catch up with the 13.8 billion year-old facts (give or take an eon or two).Torin Sarasas
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Science is about the desperate effort to catch up with the 13.7 billion year-old facts (give or take an eon or two).Torin Sarasas
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The ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in"" Fermat's principle sounds weird because it describes light's behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: "Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.Ted Chiang
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You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.Elon Musk
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Even if such beauty wasn't meant to be in a world so fallen as ours, that didn't take away from its beauty. It only made it more beautiful.Kyle West