Richard K. Morgan Quotes

There is no such thing as a harmless truth.

There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.

Don’t depend too much on anyone in this world because even your own shadow leaves you when you are in darkness.

We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

My mom and brother are both doctors, and it seems crazy that so many people think science is a mutable idea.

I'm not a scientist.

There's a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It's kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don't know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.

Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.

They do not need the sun. Who needs the sun when the eyes glow? Darkness. A woolen fog has wrapped the earth, has dropped a heavy curtain. From far away, from beyond the curtain, comes the sound of drops falling on stone. Far, far away - the autumn, people, tomorrow. ("The North")

No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us...a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface.

At the midpoint on the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest, for the clear path was lost.

How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.

Sometimes things go really well, and sometimes they don't, and it's not ultimately the most important thing.

On a night without moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.

Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do.

Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable

But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

I think we, especially in American culture, are so afraid to talk about death. And I'm not talking about literal death. I'm talking about shedding skin. I'm talking about rebirth, ultimately, and how we continue to change as human beings and continue to grow. There's that great Henry Miller quote, "All growth is a leap in the dark."

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

Rationality will not save us.