Peter Watts

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

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

“Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding i...”

“Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding.”

“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.”

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and...”

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

“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.”

“I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a pre...”

“There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.”

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.”

“Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run...”

“Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or...”

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

“Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality...”

“It’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.”

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

“Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.”

“Technology implies belligerence.”

“You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.”