Vernor Vinge Quotes

Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, she’d revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, and—after it was founded—to the Executive Council. Ravna had kept her mouth shut about the surveillance suite; she and the Children were trapped on a world of medieval strangers....So at the beginning Ravna had kept some secrets. It was now years too late to reveal this one. In the Beyond, “cameras” were more than what early tech civilizations imagined. Cameras could be a coat of paint, or critters that looked like insects, or even a bacterial infection. Delivery of the information to the observer could be even stranger, a diffuse cloud of perturbations—acoustic, visual, thermal—that took enormous processing to reconstruct.

~ Vernor Vinge

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

~ Vernor Vinge

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

~ Vernor Vinge

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

~ Vernor Vinge

All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

~ Vernor Vinge

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

~ Vernor Vinge

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for.

~ Vernor Vinge

You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.

~ Vernor Vinge

Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.

~ Vernor Vinge

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

~ Vernor Vinge

Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

~ Vernor Vinge

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.

~ Vernor Vinge

One of his greatest talents was empathy, no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

~ Vernor Vinge

Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.

~ Vernor Vinge

Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.

~ Vernor Vinge

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

~ Vernor Vinge

Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.

~ Vernor Vinge

It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.

~ Vernor Vinge

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

~ Vernor Vinge

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

~ Vernor Vinge

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.

~ Vernor Vinge

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.

~ Vernor Vinge