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User talk:66.68.115.211

—Jeremy Hanson 22:51, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

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User talk:67.23.61.127

—Jeremy Hanson 22:51, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

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User talk:212.69.244.200

—Jeremy Hanson 22:53, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:212.69.244.200


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Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter (born November 13, 1957) is a British science fiction writer.
 * For the trilogy A Time Odyssey, and the novel The Light of Other Days, both co-written with Arthur C. Clarke, see Clarke's Wikiquote page.

Vacuum Diagrams (1997)

 * Page numbers from the mass market edition, published by Eos Books; ISBN 0-06-105904-8, first printing, April 2001
 * Winner of the 1999 Philip K. Dick Award
 * See Stephen Baxter's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details

 * Time stretches like a lazy leopard when it wants to.
 * More Than Time or Distance (p. 161)

 * I’ve made myself a rich man. You shouldn’t assume that makes me a fool.
 * The Quagma Datum (p. 201)

 * Paul closed his eyes, hoping to make the incomprehensible Universe disappear into the vacuum from which it had sprung.
 * Vacuum Diagrams (p. 266)

 * There was no cognition he realized. There was only perception.
 * Secret History (p. 350)

 * The last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star. Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say. The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.
 * The Baryonic Lords (p. 467)

Return to Titan (2010)
Page numbers from Godlike Machines (ed. Jonathan Strahan), published by The Science Fiction Book Club, ISBN 978-1-61664-759-9

 * “So that’s that,” Miriam said. “We have a plan.” “You have a shared delusion,” I said.
 * p. 132

 * We all project our petty lives upon the universe.
 * p. 157

Raft (1991)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Xeelee: An Omnibus published by Gollancz ISBN 978-0-575-09041-5 in 2010

 * The secret of a Scientist is not what he knows. It’s what he asks.
 * Chapter 4 (p. 45)

 * The essential condition for life is the existence of sharp energy gradients.
 * Chapter 15 (p. 151)

 * “Hunger,” Hollerbach said. “The universal imperative.”
 * Chapter 15 (p. 153)

 * Self-doubt is part of being human...but the main thing is to get on with the business of survival.
 * Chapter 16 (p. 158)

Timelike Infinity (1992)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Xeelee: An Omnibus published by Gollancz ISBN 978-0-575-09041-5 in 2010

 * But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 218)

 * It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level...A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.
 * Chapter 12 (p. 266)

 * “It was a ploy, Jaar. I was trying to manipulate you, to get you to fight, to make you do what I wanted you to do.” “I know that.” He smiled. “Of course I know that. But the motives behind your words don’t reduce their truth. Don’t you see that?”
 * Chapter 12 (p. 271)

 * If this was the basis of the faith of the Friends, then no wonder the Friends were so remote, so intense—so careless of their everyday lives, of the pain and death of others. History as it existed was nothing more than a shabby prototype of the global optimization to come, when the Ultimate Observer discarded all inferior worldlines. And no wonder then, he thought, the Friends were so leached of humanity. Their mystical vision had removed all significance from their own lives—the only lives they could experience, whatever the truth of their philosophy—and it had rendered them deeply flawed, less than human. He opened his eyes and studied Shira. He saw again the patient intensity which resided inside this fragile girl—and he saw now how damaged she was by her philosophy. She was not fully alive, and perhaps never could be; he pitied her, he realized.
 * Chapter 13 (p. 281)

 * “That’s the trouble with living so damned long,” Michael said. “Soured relationships last for ever.”
 * Chapter 15 (p. 298)

 * Human consciousness was an artificial thing. Once humans had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles in the guise of humans. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Michael saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide. He, the last man, need no longer cling to such outmoded comforts. There was no cognition, he realized. There was only perception.
 * Chapter 16 (p. 307)

Flux (1993)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Xeelee: An Omnibus published by Gollancz ISBN 978-0-575-09041-5 in 2010

 * Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older.
 * Chapter 2 (p. 326)

 * Bzya touched his shoulder. “But that’s why you and I are here, old man. To keep the world away from boys like Farr and Cris—to give them a place that seems as stable and eternal as your parents did when you were a child—until they are old enough to cope with the truth.”
 * Chapter 19 (p. 484)

 * “But Parz was better than nothing: it offered stability, regulation, a framework to live in. People gripe about their tithes—and nobody’s going to pretend that the Committee gets it right all the time—but most of us would prefer taxes to living wild. With all respect to you, my friend.” He bit into his cake. “And that’s still true today; as true as it ever was.”
 * Chapter 20 (p. 497)

 * Why should it be so? It was as if humans built such places as this with the sole purpose of finding ways to dominate each other. Muub listened to Adda’s clumsy explanation of this. “But it’s inevitable,” he said, his face neutral. “You have to have organization—hierarchy—if you are to run the complex, interlinking systems which sustain a society like the City with its hinterland. And only within such a society can man afford art, science, wisdom—even leisure of the most brutish sort, like these Games. And with hierarchies comes power.” He smiled at Adda, condescending once more. “People aren’t very noble, upfluxer. Look around you. Their darker side will find expression in any situation where they can best each other.”
 * Chapter 21 (p. 504)

 * You’re a damn fool, boy. I want you to know that now, in case I don’t get a chance to tell you later.
 * Chapter 27 (p. 554)

Ring (1994)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Xeelee: An Omnibus published by Gollancz ISBN 978-0-575-09041-5 in 2010
 * All italics as in the book

 * “You know, in principle, why our world is as it is. Isn’t that sufficient? Is it really necessary for you to understand every detail?” But if I don’t understand, Morrow thought sourly, then you can control me. Arbitrarily. And that’s what I find hard to accept.
 * Chapter 8 (p. 649)

 * Try to remember this lesson. It might keep you alive a little longer. The most precious thing to a human being is a mind-set: more precious than one’s own life, even. Human history has taught us that lesson time and again, with its endless parade of wars—human sacrifices en masse—thousands of deaths over the most trivial of differences of religious interpretation.
 * Chapter 10 (p. 669)

 * “No,” Morrow said. “I can’t accept that. I don’t always agree with the Planners. But they aren’t killers.” “You think not?” Uvarov laughed again. “The survivalists—your ‘Planners’—are psychotic. Of course. As I am. And you. We are a fundamentally flawed species. Most of humanity, for most of its history, has been driven by a series of mass psychotic delusions. The labels changed, but the nature of the delusions barely varied...”
 * Chapter 10 (p. 669)

 * “But that’s insane,” Morrow protested. Uvarov hissed, “No one ever said it wasn’t. We’re human beings. What do you expect?”
 * Chapter 10 (p. 680)

 * She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old.
 * Chapter 13 (p. 704)

 * Understanding is the key to turning anything from a threat into an opportunity.
 * Chapter 17 (p. 736)

 * Empty. Barren. These were the true conditions of the Universe, she thought; life, and variety, and energy, were isolated aberrations.
 * Chapter 18 (p. 743)

 * It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just process. Why shouldn’t it be beautiful?
 * Chapter 19 (p. 755)

 * Maybe it’s time we humans abandoned our species-specific chauvinism—our petty outrage that the Universe has unfolded in a way that doesn’t suit us.
 * Chapter 27 (p. 825)

 * Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating.
 * Chapter 30 (p. 852)

 * The river of time flowed unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.
 * Chapter 35 (p. 891; closing words)

The Time Ships (1995)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Eos ISBN 978-0-06-105648-2 in June 2000, 13th printing
 * All italics and ellipses as in the book

 * Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.
 * Book 1, “Dark Night”, Chapter 1, “Time Traveling” (p. 8)

 * I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are!—and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution—forces which mold inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!
 * Chapter 1, “Time Traveling” (p. 8)

 * My fear was gone, to be replaced by a numbing sense of tedium: it is remarkable how rapidly the human mind can accommodate the most remarkable of changed circumstances.
 * Chapter 8, “A Visitor” (p. 37)

 * One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet—at least up to our nineteenth century—the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep—it has sometimes seemed to me—capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher. The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of “sacred” land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.
 * Chapter 13, “How the Morlocks Lived” (p. 66)

 * I have always been distrustful of personal power—for I have met not one man wise enough to be entrusted with it.
 * Chapter 14, “Constructions and Divergences” (p. 71)

 * Men thought of war—always the next one—as a great cleansing, as the last war that ever need to be fought. But it was not so, I could see now: men fought wars because of the legacy of the brute inside them, and any justification was a mere rationalization supplied by our oversized brains.
 * Chapter 18, “The New Eloi” (p. 92)

 * For what goal is there for intelligent creatures, but to gather and store all available information?
 * Chapter 18, “The New Eloi” (p. 94)

 * Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era.
 * Chapter 22, “Rotations and Deceptions” (p. 118)

 * Cause and Effect, when Time Machines are about, are rather awkward concepts.
 * Book 2, “Paradox”, Chapter 6, “Persuasion and Skepticism” (p. 154)

 * The hugeness of time, and the littleness of man and his achievements, quite crushed me; and my own, petty concerns seemed of absurd insignificance. The story of Humanity seemed trivial, a flash-lamp moment lost in the dark, mindless halls of Eternity.
 * Book 3, “The War with the Germans”, Chapter 17, “The Watcher” (p. 263)

 * It was a striking demonstration of how geomorphology, the shape of the landscape, dominates human geography.
 * Book 4, “The Paleocene Sea”, Chapter 19, “Lights in the Sky” (p. 365)

 * You can observe for yourself the degradation of the air and water around us. The earth has a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of human industry, and with enough development, the planet could even be rendered uninhabitable.
 * Chapter 19, “Lights in the Sky” (p. 367)

 * “No. You are wrong. These structures are alive.” “What?” “By any reasonable definition of the word. They can reproduce themselves. They can manipulate the external world, creating local conditions of increased order. They have internal states which can change independently of external inputs; they have memories which can be accessed at will…All these are characteristics of Life, and Mind.
 * Book 5, “White Earth”, Chapter 3, “The Universal Constructor” (p. 399)

 * “You see, a species cannot survive for long if it continues to carry around the freight of antique motivations that you bear. No offense.” “None taken,” I said drily. “I mean, of course, territoriality, aggression, the violent settlement of disputes… Imperialist designs and the like become unimaginable when technology advances past a certain point.”
 * Chapter 8, “A Proposition” (p. 427)

 * Information—its gathering, interpretation and storage—is the ultimate goal of all intelligent life.
 * Chapter 8, “A Proposition” (p. 428)

Evolution (2002)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Del Rey ISBN 0-345-45783-8 in February 2004, 1st printing
 * All italics as in the book

 * Bex shrugged. “You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.”
 * Prologue (p. 6)

 * If you were part of a group there was always the chance that the predator would take the next guy, not you. It was a cold-blooded lottery that paid off often enough to be worthwhile adapting for. But there were disadvantages to group living: mainly, if there were large numbers of you, there was increased competition for food. As that competition resolved itself, the inevitable result was social complexity—and the size of the adapids’ brains had increased so that they were capable of handling that complexity. Then, of course, they were forced to become even more efficient at searching for food to fuel those big brains. It was the way of the future. As primate societies became ever more complex, a kind of cognitive arms race would continue, increasing smartness fueled by increasing social complications.
 * Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section I (p. 113)

 * There was no design in this: no sense of improvement, of purpose. All that was happening was that each organism was struggling to preserve itself, its offspring, and its kin. But as the environment slowly changed, so through relentless selection did the species that inhabited it. It was not a process fueled by life, but by death: the elimination of the less well adapted, the endless culling of inappropriate possibilities. But the potential of an unseen future was no consolation to those who lived through the relentless culling.
 * Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section II (pp. 120-121)

 * The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.
 * Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section III (p. 132)

 * On the longest of timescales, over millions of years, the workings of chance defied human intuition. Humans were equipped with a subjective consciousness of risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifespan of less than a century or so. Event that came much less frequently than that—such as asteroid impacts—were place, in human minds, in the category not of rare, but of never. But the impacts happened even so, and to a creature with a lifespan of, say, ten million years, would not have seemed so improbable at all. Given enough time even such unlikely events as ocean crossings from Africa to South America would inevitably occur, over and again, and would shape the destiny of life.
 * Chapter 6 “The Crossing” section IV (p. 185)

 * With his eland meat Brow was able to reinforce his political position among the men—and buy access to the women, which was ultimately the only purpose of his endless battle for dominance.
 * Chapter 9 “The Walkers” section I (p. 256)

 * There were other ways for primates to live, other kinds of societies that could be imagined. But once the pattern had been set, it was all but impossible to break.
 * Chapter 9 “The Walkers” section I (p. 257)

 * Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.
 * Chapter 10 “The Crowded Land” section II (p. 308)

 * If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.
 * Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section I (p. 337)

 * The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.
 * Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (p. 367)

 * A growing belief that behind every event lay intention—be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky—was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even the right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.
 * Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (pp. 370-371)

 * In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.
 * Chapter 13 “Last Contact” section I (pp. 406-407)

 * Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna’s people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals. But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man’s kind.
 * Chapter 13 “Last Contact” section III (p. 432)

 * It (i. e., agriculture) was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future—even genetic engineering—were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.
 * Chapter 14 “The Swarming People” section II (p. 456)

 * But even if it is true, even if we are governed by the legacy of an animal past, then it is up to us to behave as if it were not so.
 * Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 501)

 * In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem. “You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.”
 * Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 502)

 * The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth. But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here. Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness. I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this. So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?
 * Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)

 * What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before.
 * Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (p. 513)

 * As the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.
 * Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section II (p. 525)

 * “You aren’t doing much for morale, Sidewise.” Sidewise shot back, “And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what’s blindingly obvious all around us.”
 * Chapter 17 “A Long Shadow” section II (p. 539)

 * Nothing mankind had done in its short and bloody history had made the slightest bit of difference to this patient geographical realignment. Meanwhile the Earth, left to its own devices, had deployed a variety of healing mechanisms, physical, chemical, biological, and geological, to recover from the devastating interventions of its human inhabitants. Air pollutants had been broken up by sunlight and dispersed. Bog ore had absorbed much metallic waste. Vegetation had recolonized abandoned landscapes, roots breaking up concrete and asphalt, overgrowing ditches and canals. Erosion by wind and water had caused the final collapse of the last structures, washing it all into sand. Meanwhile the relentless processes of variation and selection had worked to fill an empty world.
 * Chapter 18 “The Kingdom of the Rats” section II (p. 579)

 * For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.
 * Chapter 18 “The Kingdom of the Rats” section III (p. 597)

 * Life had always been chancy. And now life had found ways of surviving the ultimate extinction event. In new oceans and on strange lands, evolution had begun again. But it had nothing to do with mankind.
 * Chapter 19 “A Far Distant Futurity” section III (p. 636)

 * Anyhow, that’s our story. And I think, in my glimpses of the great encompassing mechanism that has shaped us all, I’ve seen a little of the numinous. That’s enough of God for me.
 * Epilogue (p. 644)

Ages in Chaos (2003)

 * All page numbers from the American trade paperback edition published by Forge ISBN 978-0-765-31268-6

 * Ussher’s intense and obsessive project seems very odd to the eyes of a modern scientist. After all he had deduced the age of the Earth without looking at a scrap of physical evidence—not a single rock.
 * Chapter 2, “The first day of the creation is deduced” (p. 17)

 * Francis Bacon, who died in the seventeenth century, argued strongly that philosophy and theology should be kept separate, and that we should concentrate our studies on the local problems and the interconnections between material and efficient causes. Final-cause analysis was just a distraction: ‘Inquiry into final causes is sterile, and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.’
 * Chapter 5, “The Earth’s blood is the veins of its waters” (p. 43)

 * Buffon’s work created a great furore, of course. The theologians at the Sorbonne condemned him, and Buffon dutifully retracted. But he wasn’t sincere: ‘It is better to be humble than hanged.’
 * Chapter 6, “Upon this chaos rode the distressed ark” (p. 55)

 * ‘He set no great value on money, or, perhaps, to speak properly, he set on it no more than its true value.’
 * Chapter 8, “A cursed country where one has to shape everything out of a block” (p. 68)

 * In his reliance on evidence, preferably obtained at first hand, Hutton was showing the way to the geological methods of the future.
 * Chapter 8, “A cursed country where one has to shape everything out of a block” (p. 70)

 * Despite his friendship with Adam Smith, he believed in government intervention in agriculture, as it was too important to be left to market forces and chance: ‘The husbandman maintains the nation in all its ease, its affluence and its splendour,’ he wrote. But farmers too had a responsibility for the public good. Rotation of crops, ensuring equal acreages of different crops at any given time, would help keep prices stable.
 * Chapter 10, “Assemblies of good fellows” (p. 95)

 * Hutton became very critical of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt he wrote, ‘I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve themselves.’
 * Chapter 11, “The power of heat is unlimited” (p. 105)

 * His overriding lesson for thinkers like Hutton was that scientists, even those occupied by an apparently ‘concrete’ discipline like geology, need to be careful not just about what they claim to know but also about how they claim to know it. Human reason is a fragile thing and prone to be overthrown by suggestibility.
 * Chapter 13, “Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion” (p. 124)

 * ‘If, in pursuing this object, we employ our skill in research, not in forming vain conjectures; and if data are to be found, on which Science may form just conclusions, we should not long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history of this Earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and not evidence, has decided. For in no subject is there naturally less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by prejudice, or misguided by false theory, have neglected to employ that light by which they should have seen the system of the world.’
 * Chapter 14, “We have now got to the end of our reasoning” (p. 130)

 * ‘In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.’
 * Chapter 15, “The world was tired out with geological theories” (p. 153)

 * The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.
 * Chapter 15, “The world was tired out with geological theories” (p. 160)

 * Darwin had found a way in which a species could be shaped to fit its environment—not by divine intervention, not by mind, but through the steady, relentless working of natural law. Just like the Huttonian prescription for the Earth, it was a Newtonian scheme for life. For better or worse, Darwin transformed our view of our place in the universe. Humans too are not the outcome of a divine design, but simply products of the relentless workings of natural laws, just like rivers and mountains, beetles and whales.
 * Chapter 20, “It altered the tone of one’s mind” (p. 208)

 * Humans and their petty doings come and go, but the geology endures.
 * Epilogue (p. 223)

Flood (2008)
Ramrod straight, he looked down at her. "I guess you skipped Bible studies at school. Genesis 10, verses 8 to 10: 'And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth... And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and-" "Babel?" "It was only generations after the flood of Noah. Chapter 11, verse 4. 'And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.'" "But God struck them down when they built the tower." "Yes. But why? 11, 6. 'Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.' That's what God said about mankind. He feared us, and so He struck us down. We have that verse up on the wall on big banners, to motivate the workforce. 'Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.'" '''"Wow," Thandie said. "You're challenging God?"''' "Why the hell not?"
 * "...Why Nimrod? Why that name?"
 * Chapter 90

Proxima (2013)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Roc, ISBN 978-0-451-46771-3 in August 2015, 8th printing

 * She was doing well with her schooling, scoring high in mathematics, sciences and deductive abilities, as well as in physical prowess and leadership skills. Her father had been paradoxically pleased when she had been flagged up with a warning about having introvert tendencies. “All great scientists are introverts,” he said. “All great engineers too, come to that. The sign of a strong, independent mind.”
 * Chapter 4 (p. 22)

 * It was always the same with engineers, Stef had observed; nothing made them happier than to be given a well-defined and achievable task, and to be left alone to get on with it.
 * Chapter 38 (p. 204)

 * If you were anywhere near the center of human affairs, even to the extent that she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws—territorialism, combativeness, reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view—looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.
 * Chapter 71 (pp. 398-399)

Ultima (2014)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Roc, ISBN 978-0-451-46773-7 in April 2016, 4th printing

 * I know the military. The sooner they can kick a problem upstairs the happier they will be.
 * Chapter 10 (p. 67)

 * Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.
 * Chapter 23 (p. 167)

 * We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.
 * Chapter 43 (p. 292)

 * Let me face bare-handed a dozen highly trained and fully armed gladiators, each with a personal grudge against me, than a lawyer with a single pointed question.
 * Chapter 49 (p. 325)

 * In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse— In the chthonic silence— All that could have been done had been done. In peace and satisfaction, minds diffuse and antique submitted to the End Time.
 * Epilogue (p. 513)

About Stephen Baxter

 * [F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.
 * James Nicoll

 * As I've often said, I'm a fan of hard SF. No, it's more like I am addicted to it, even the stepped-on 20 times and cut with powered milk and rat-poison sort of hard SF. This gets us to Stephen Baxter's Mayflower II, published last year in a limited edition from PS Publishing. In one of the great tragedies of publishing, it was not a limited enough edition and so I have read it.
 * James Nicoll )

title: Stephen Baxter


text:
Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher. His book Being and Time (1927) is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophy texts of the 20th Century, but Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis has led to much controversy and debate.

Quotes

 * The grandeur of man is measured according to what he seeks and according to the urgency by which he remains a seeker.
 * Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected "Problems" of "Logic" (Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte "Probleme" der "Logik" (1984), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0253004381, p. 7)

 * The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous.
 * The Essence of Truth, 1931-32

 * Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
 * Essence of Ground (1929)

 * In its essence, technology is something that man does not control.
 * Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger, 1966

 * Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? Das ist die Frage.
 * Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question.
 * What is Metaphysics? (1929), p. 110
 * Cf. Gottfried Leibniz, De rerum originatione radicali (1697)ː "cur aliquid potius extiterit quam nihil."

 * What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N.S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.
 * Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) — a publication of lectures of 1935.

 * This Europe, which in its ruinous blindness is forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same: the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man...
 * We [ Germans] are caught in a pincers. Situated in the center, our nation incurs the severest pressure. It is the nation with the most neighbors and hence is the most endangered. With all this, it is the most metaphysical of nations. We are certain of this vocation...

 * Introduction to Metaphysics

 * Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by "facts," ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.
 * Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) [Beitrage Zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)], notes of 1936–1938, as translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (1989)

 * The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.
 * Letter on Humanism (1947)

 * The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.
 * Letter on Humanism (1947)

 * Language is the house of the truth of Being.
 * Letter on Humanism (1947)

 * Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
 * Four Lectures on Technology (1949)

 * Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, dass wir noch nicht denken.
 * The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
 * What is Called Thinking? [Was heisst Denken?] (1951–1952), as translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (1968)

 * Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.
 * The Question Concerning Technology (1954)

 * The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.
 * The Principle of Reason (1955–1956) as translated by Reginald Lilly (1991)

 * Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang] for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us.
 * Interview (23 September 1966), published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976), as translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader (1991), edited by Richard Wolin.

 * From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today’s literature is, for instance, largely destructive.
 * Interview (23 September 1966), published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976), as translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader (1991), edited by Richard Wolin.

 * I see the situation of man in the world of planetary technicity not as an inexitricable and inescapable destiny, but I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.
 * Interview (23 September 1966), published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976), as translated by William Richardson in Risk and Meaning, Nicolas Bouleau (translated by Dené Oglesby and Martin Crossley), ed. Springer, 2011 ISBN 978-3-642-17646-3, page 102.

 * Today we decide about metaphysics and about even more elevated things at philosophy conferences. For everything that is to be done these days we must first have a meeting, and here is how it works: people come together, constantly come together, and they all wait for one another to turn up so that the others will tell them how it is, and if it doesn’t get said, never mind, everyone has had their say. It may very well be that all the talkers who are having their say have understood little of the matter in question, but still we believe that if we accumulate all that misunderstanding something like understanding will leap forth at the end of the day. Thus there are people today who travel from one meeting to the next and who are sustained by the confidence that something is really happening, that they’ve actually done something; whereas, at bottom, they’ve merely ducked out of work, seeking in chatter a place to build a nest for their helplessness—a helplessness, it is true, that they will never understand.
 * Gesamtausgabe, 20:376, as translated by David Farrell Krell in Portraits of American Continental Philosophers (1999), p. 101

Being and Time (1927)

 * It is said that "being" is the most universal and the emptiest concept. As such it resists every attempt at definition. Nor does this most universal and thus indefinable concept need any definition. Everybody uses it constantly and also already understands what is meant by it.
 * Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)

 * Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.
 * Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)

 * But in fact there is no circle at all in the formulation of our question. Beings can be determined in their being without the explicit concept of the meaning of being having to be already available. If this were not so there could not have been as yet any ontological knowledge. And probably no one would deny the factual existence of such knowledge. It is true that "being" is "presupposed" in all previous ontology, but not as an available concept-not as the sort of thing we are seeking.
 * Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)

 * Our elucidations of the preliminary concept of phenomenology show that its essential character does not consist in its actuality as a philosophical "movement." Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology solely by seizing upon it as a possibility.
 * Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)

 * We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed
 * Macquarrie & Robinson translation

 * Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.
 * Stambaugh translation

 * The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees."
 * Stambaugh translation

 * In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.
 * Stambaugh translation

 * Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.
 * Macquarrie & Robinson translation

 * Being is only Being for Dasein
 * Macquarrie & Robinson translation

 * Der Tod ist die Möglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit.
 * Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.
 * Macquarrie & Robinson translation

What Is A Thing? (1935, 1968)

 * What Is A Thing? Heidegger, Martin. Translated by W.B. Barton and V. Deutsch. What Is A Thing? Gateway Editions, 1968.

 * Plato has preserved in the Theaetetus - the story is that Thales, while occupied in studying the heavens above and looking up, fell into a well. A good-looking and whimsical maid from Thrace laughed at him and told him that while he might passionately want to know all things in the universe, the things in front of his very nose and feet were unseen by him." Plato added: "This jest also fits all those who become involved in Philosophy." Therefore, the question, What is a thing?" must always be rated as one that causes housemaids to laugh. p. 3

 * Kant speaks of the "thing-in-itself" (Ding an sich) in order to distinguish it from the "thing-for-us" (Ding fur uns), that is, as a "phenomenon." A thing-in-itself is that which is not approachable through experience as are the rocks, plants, and animals. Every thing-for-us is as a thing and also a thing-in-itself, which means that it is recognized absolutely withing the absolute knowledge of God. But not every thing-in-itself is also a thing-for-us: God, for instance, is a thing-in-itself, as Kant uses the word, according to the meaning of Christian theology. p. 5

 * The particularity (Jeweiligkeit) os the places and their manifoldness are grounded in space, and the particularity of the time points is grounded in time. That basic characteristic of the thing, that essential determination of the thingness of the thing to be this one (je dieses), is grounded in the essence of space and time. Our question "What is a thing?" includes, therefore, the questions "What is space?" and "What is time?" It is customary to speak of of them both together. p. 16

 * There is no information about the thingness of the thing without knowledge of the kind of truth in which the thing stands. But there is no information about this truth of the thing without knowledge of the thingness of the thing whose truth is in question. Where are we to get a foothold? The ground slips away under us. Perhaps we are already close to falling into the well. At any rate the housemaids are already laughing. p. 27

 * "Here is the chalk." This is a truth; and here and the now hereby characterize the chalk so that we emphasize by saying; the chalk, which means "this." We take a scrap of paper and we write the truth down: "Here is the chalk." We lay this written statement beside the thing of which it is the truth. After the lecture is finished both doors are opened, the classroom is aired, there will be a draft, and the scrap of paper, let us suppose, will flutter out into the corridor. A student finds it on his way to the cafeteria, reads the sentence. "Here is the chalk," and ascertains that this is not true at all. Through the draft the truth has become an untruth. Strange that a truth should depend on a gust of wind. ... We have made the truth about the chalk independent of us and entrusted it to a scrap of paper. p. 29-30

 * "What is a thing?" is historical, because every report of the past, that is of the preliminaries to the question about the thing, is concerned with something static. This kind of historical reporting is an explicit shutting down of history, whereas it is, after all, a happening. We question historically if we ask what is still happening even if it seems to be past. We ask what is still happening and whether we remain equal to this happening so that it can really develop. p. 43

 * Do the essences of proposition and of the truth determine themselves from out of the essence of the thing, or does the essence of the thing determine itself from out of the essence of the proposition? The question is posed as an either/or. However does this either/or itself suffice? Are the essence of the thing and the essence of the proposition only built as mirror images because both of them together determine themselves from out of the same but deeper lying root? However, what and where can be this common ground for the essence of the thing and of the proposition and of their origin? The unconditioned (Unbedingt)? We stated at the beginning that what conditions the essense of the thing in its thingness can no longer itself be thing and conditioned, it must be an unconditioned (Un-bedingtes). p. 47

 * Kant's philosophy shifts for the first time the whole of modern thought and being (Desein) into the clarity and transparency of the foundation (Begrundung). This determines every attitude toward knowledge since then, as well as the bounds (Abgrenzungen) and appraisals of the sciences in the nineteenth century up to the present time. Therein Kant towers so far above all who precede and follow that even those who reject him or go beyond him still remain entirely dependent upon him. p. 55-56

 * Mathematics is as little a natural science as philosophy is one of the humanities. Philosophy in its essence belongs as little in the philosophical faculty as mathematics belongs to natural science. To house philosophy and mathematics in this way today seems to be a blemish or a mistake in the catalog of the universities. Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the words: "Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!" p. 69,75

 * Modern philosophy is usually considered to have begun with Descartes (1596-1650), who lived a generation after Galileo. The following is the usual image of Descartes and his philosophy: During the Middle Ages philosophy stood - if it stood independently at all - under the exclusive domination of theology and gradually degenerated into a mere analysis of concepts and elucidations of traditional opinion and propositions. It petrified into an academic knowledge which no longer concerned man and was unable to illuminate reality as a whole. Then Descartes appeared and liberated philosophy from this position. He began by doubting everything, but this doubt finally did run into something which could no longer be doubted, for, inasmuch as the skeptic doubts, he cannot doubt that he, the skeptic, is present and must be present in order to doubt at all. As I doubt I must admit that "I am." The "I," accordingly, is the indubitable. As a doubter, Descartes forced men into doubt in this way; he led them to think of themselves, as their "I." Thus the "I," human subjectivity, came to be declared the center of thought. From here originated the I-viewpoint of modern times and its subjectivism. p. 98-99

 * Kant stands in the tradition of the Leibniz-Woffian school. He made the thinking through of English philosophy, especially Hume, fruitful for the formation of his own questioning. On the whole, however, the school-philosophy of Leibniz-Wolffian stamp remained predominant in Kant. He used Metaphysica 1739, by Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) in his lectures in metaphysics and appreciated this textbook "especially for the richness and precision of its teaching method." p. 114

Nietzsche (1961)

 * Translated by D. F. Krell (New York: 1991)

 * In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.
 * p. xxxix

 * If in Nietzsche’s thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
 * p. 4

 * “For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy.” (XIV, 24) Abstract thinking a feast? The highest form of human existence? … “The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnestness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection—all obviously states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence.” (WM, 916). For that reason, we might add that thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself.
 * p. 5

 * For anyone who at the end of Western philosophy can and must still question philosophically, the decisive question is no longer merely “What basic character do beings manifest?” or “How may the being of beings be characterized?” but “What is this ‘being’ itself?” The decisive question is that of “the meaning of being,” not merely that of the being of beings.
 * p. 18

 * “To stamp becoming with the character of being—that is the supreme will to power.” (WM 617) This suggests that becoming only is if it is grounded in being as being: “That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to one of being.”
 * p. 19

 * Eternity, not as a static “now,” nor as a sequence of “nows” rolling off into the infinite, but as the “now” that bends back into itself. … Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking being as time.
 * p. 20

 * The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established.
 * p. 26

 * In Nietzsche’s view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.
 * p. 26

 * In contrast to “Blessed are they who do not see and still believe,” he speaks of “seeing and still not believing.”
 * p. 30

 * If beings are grasped as will to power, the “should” which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a “should” does not determine being. Being determines a “should.” “When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values.” (VIII, 89)
 * p. 32

 * The small are always dependent on the great; they are “small” precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other “greats” and who can transform it in an original manner.
 * p. 35

 * Nietzsche … does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.
 * p. 50

 * This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche’s conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who “enjoy” and “experience” it. That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche’s teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): “Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman’s aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of ‘what is beautiful.’ In all philosophy to date the artist is missing.” Philosophy of art means “aesthetics” for Nietzsche too—but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.
 * p. 70

 * ...der Wille zur »wahren Welt« im Sinne Platons und des Christentums … ist in Wahrheit ein Neinsagen zu unserer hiesigen Welt, in der gerade die Kunst heimisch ist.
 * The will to the “true world” in the sense of Plato and Christianity … is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home.
 * p. 74

 * The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.
 * p. 78

 * We do not “have” a body; rather, we “are” bodily.
 * p. 99

 * Nietzsche understands the aesthetic state of the observer and recipient on the basis of the state of the creator. Thus the effect of the artwork is nothing else than a reawakening of the creator’s state in the one who enjoys the artwork. Observation of art follows in the wake of creation. Nietzsche says (SM, 821), “—the effect of artworks is arousal of the art-creating state, rapture.”
 * p. 117

 * Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.
 * p. 117

 * Form displays the relation [to beings] itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open.
 * p. 119

 * We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremendous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style.
 * p. 125

 * The word “art” does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.
 * p. 125

 * Who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthfulness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.
 * p. 127

Quotes about Heidegger

 * Alphabetized by author

 * [Heidegger] lies notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can.
 * Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's onetime lover, as quoted in Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, by Elżbieta Ettinger, Yale University Press (1997), p. 28.

 * I desire to restore alienation to the literary sense it possessed before the abominable Martin Heidegger, Nazi philosopher of Dasein....I prefer... Freud, alienation essentially as the estrangement he termed the "Uncanny" (Unheimlich), which, as I have argued elsewhere, is our modern version of the Sublime.
 * Harold Bloom Introduction, Bloom's Literary Themes: Alienation, Edited by Bloom and Blake Hobby, Chelsea House Publications (2009), p. xv

 * As we have seen, Heidegger secularizes the Single One of Kierkegaard, that is, he severs the relation to the absolute for which Kierkegaard’s man becomes a Single One. And as we have seen, he does not replace this “for” with any other worldly and human “for”. He ignores the decisive fact that only the man who has become a Single One, a self, a real person, is able to have a complete relation of his life to the other self, a relation which is not beneath but above the problematic of the relations between man and man, and which comprises, withstands and overcomes all this problematic situation.
 * Martin Buber, Between Man And Man, 1947 Translated By Ronald Gregor Smith  Kegan Paul London 1965 p. 174-175

 * Heidegger’s political views are commonly deplored today on account of his early and open support of Nazism. Because of this connection, many like to suppose that his influence on subsequent political thought (as distinct from general intellectual thought) in Europe has been meager. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Heidegger’s major ideas were sufficiently protean that with a bit of tinkering they could easily be adopted by the left, which they were. Following the war, Heidegger’s thought, shorn of its national socialism but fortified in its anti-Americanism, was embraced by many on the left, often without attribution. In the writings of numerous thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, “Heideggerianism” was married to communism, and this odd coupling became the core of the intellectual left for the next generation.
 * James Ceasar, “The Philosophical Origins of Anti-Americanism in Europe”, in Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad (2000), Paul Hollander (ed), Ivan R. Dee, ISBN 1566635640, p. 58

 * What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world’s evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.
 * Joseph Epstein (2012), Essays in Biography, Axios Press, p. 52.

 * Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain 'the German catastrophe' by arguing that technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller; thus they were unable to resist Hitler's 'mass Machiavellianism'. Thomas Mann was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in 'Brother Hitler', the entire German Bildungsburgertum possessed a monstrous younger sibling who embodied some of their deepest-rooted aspirations. An academic education, far from inoculating people against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. So much for the greatness of the German universities. Their fall from grace was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel.
 * Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. xliii

 * Heidegger's method, and especially the philosophical earnestness fundamental to its application, achieved for the philosophical public of Germany a new Copernican revolution of speculative thought. It one takes that judgment seriously, one should expect, therefore, that a more considered study might reveal, within the framework of an anthropocentric approach to metaphysics, some unique insight or some new tools of analysis. As a matter of fact, I cannot make any such discovery either in Heidegger's published works or in oral exposition of his views. A close examination seems rather to expose, within the ponderous sentences of essay lecture, a very insubstantial basis for a flimsy superstructure. Heidegger's philosophy is unique only rampant misuse of language and in its own emphatic claim to uniqueness.
 * Marjorie Glicksman, "A Note on the Philosophy of Heidegger". The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 35 no 4, Feb 17, 1938, pp. 93-104.

 * It seems to be for the greater glory of Heidegger that all thinkers of the past twenty-five hundred years are found to have been so tragically off the track.
 * Marjorie Glicksman, "A Note on the Philosophy of Heidegger". The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 35 no 4, Feb 17, 1938, pp. 93-104.

 * It should be added, perhaps, that the forcefulness of Heidegger's "aristocratic" arguments depends in large part on the personality of the lecturer. One is caught as in a political rally by the slow intensity of his speech. The contemptuous epigrams with which he dismisses the protests of logic or good sense sting the listeners ears with their acidity; and his prophetic solemnity when he invokes the quest for being ties one as spellbound as if one were a novice taking his first steps into the Eleusinian mysteries.
 * Marjorie Glicksman, "A Note on the Philosophy of Heidegger". The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 35 no 4, Feb 17, 1938, pp. 93-104.

 * Martin Heidegger taught an entire course on boredom, calling it the “insidious creature [that] maintains monstrous essence in our [Being].” It’s been speculated that Heidegger signed up with the Nazis at least in part to cure himself of boredom.
 * Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (2007), NY: Doubleday, ISBN 9780385511841, p. 428

 * When, in the summer of 1953, that is, still during my university studies in Bonn, I read a recently published lecture by Heidegger from the year 1935, the Introduction to Metaphysics, the jargon, the choice of terminology and the style told me at once that the spirit of fascism was manifested in these motives, thoughts and phrases. The book really unsettled me because I had regarded myself up till then as a student of Heidegger. The newspaper article, in which I poured out my great political and philosophical disappointment the same weekend, is therefore entitled: “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger”. At the time it was impossible to know that Heidegger had written anti-Semitic letters to his wife as early as 1916 and that he had become a convinced Nazi long before 1933. The fact that he had remained an unrepentant Nazi, however, could be known by 1953 at the latest.
 * Jürgen Habermas, in conversation with Michaël Foessel, "Critique and communication: Philosophy's missions" (16 October 2015)

 * Heidegger is notorious for the obscurity of his prose and for his actions and inactions on behalf of the National Socialists during the 1930s, and he is unquestionably the leading twentieth-century philosopher for the postmodernists.
 * Stephen Hicks (2004), Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, AZ: Tempe, Scholargy Press, p. 58

 * Ask professional philosophers of today to name the five most significant philosophers of the twentieth century and, whether they love him or loathe him, most will include Heidegger on the list.
 * Stephen Hicks, Nietzsche and the Nazis (2007), Occam's Razor, p. 10

 * In recent years [Heidegger] has allowed his anti-Semitism to come increasingly to the fore, even in his dealings with his groups of devoted Jewish students. […] The events of the last few weeks have struck at the deepest roots of my existence.
 * Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Heidegger's mentor, following Heidegger’s appointment as Rector of University of Freiburg in 1933 and the passing of anti-Jewish laws that restricted his professional duties. As quoted by Richard Wolen, Heidegger's Children, Princeton University Press, 2001, p.11.

 * Heidegger's Sein und Zeit [Being and Time]... develops a "fundamental ontology" according to the modes in which the self "exists,"... and originates... several meanings of Being...explicated in a number of fundamental categories... [i.e.,] "existentials"... functional structures of the active movement of inner time by which a "world" is entertained and the self [is] originated as a continuous event. The "existentials" have... a profoundly temporal meaning... [i.e.,] categories of internal or mental time, the true dimension of existence... must exhibit, and distribute between them, the three horizons of time—past, present, and future... [I]n the classical... "table of categories"... the column under... "present" remains practically empty... For the existentially "genuine" present is the present of the "situation," which is wholly defined in terms of the self's relation to its "future" and "past." It flashes up... in the light of decision, when the projected "future" reacts upon the given "past" (Geworfenheit) and in this meeting constitutes what Heidegger calls the "moment" (Augenblick): moment, not duration, is the temporal mode of this "present"—a creature of the other two horizons of time, a function of their ceaseless dynamics, and no independent dimension to dwell in. ...a derivative and "deficient" mode of existence. ...[A]ll the relevant categories of existence... having to do with the possible authenticity of selfhood, fall in correlate pairs under... either past or future... No present remains for genuine existence to repose in. Leaping off... from its past, existence projects itself into the future; faces its ultimate limit, death; returns from this eschatological glimpse of nothingness... [T]here is no present to dwell in, only the crisis between past and future... balanced on the razor's edge of decision which thrusts ahead.
 * , The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (1963) pp. 335-336.

 * Heidegger’s initial attitude toward Hitler throws light on his later thought. He once believed in a false messiah. Now he mistrusts all answers and celebrates the ability to wait as piety itself. Not being able to wait is the sin against the spirit. The second coming – rather the second half of Being and Time –may seem overdue. But, though impious in other ways, most English-speaking philosophers can wait. In all his later writings Heidegger insists on the importance of questions and not on answers, on thinking rather than conclusions; but, unlike Jaspers, whom he resembles at this point, he does not speak of “philosophizing” but of “being on the way.”
 * Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, 1959, 1960 Heidegger’s Castle p. 344

 * All in all, Heidegger's philosophy is an example of Herrschaftswissen [roughly translated as 'knowledge of domination'] in the service of a repressive society. It calls on us to abandon concepts for the sake of a promised communion with Being — but this Being has no content, precisely because it is supposed to be apprehended without the 'mediation' of concepts; basically it is no more than a substantivation of the copula 'is'.
 * Leszek Kołakowski, in Main Currents in Marxism, Vol. 3: The Breakdown (1981), Oxford University Press, ISBN 0192851098, p. p 363

 * We nicknamed Heidegger ‘the little magician from Messkirch’ … His lecturing method consisted in constructing an edifice of ideas, which he himself then dismantled again so as to baffle fascinated listeners, only to leave them up in the air. This art of enchantment sometimes had the most disturbing effects in that it attracted more or less psychopathic personalities, and one female student committed suicide three years after such guessing games
 * Joseph Kockelmans, “Heidegger on Theology”, in Thinking about Being: Aspects of Heidegger’s Thought, edited by Robert W. Shahan and J.N. Mohanty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).

 * Heidegger’s thought will fit no category; no more than Hegel can be presented as a Platonist or Kant as a follower of Leibniz and Hume. It is equally foolish to say that Heidegger is just Kierkegaard de-Christianized, or Nietzsche systematized, or Hegel de-absolutized. I consider Heidegger’s philosophy one of those extraordinary manifestations of man’s forging of a knowledge of Being which the ages cannot but recon with.
 * Thomas Lange, Meaning of Heidegger; a critical study of an existentialist phenomenology, 1959 P. 8

 * What has happened to those who, like Heidegger, have tried to find their ways in immediacy, in intuition, in nature, would be too sad to retell—and is well known anyway. What is certain is that those pathmarks off the beaten track led indeed nowhere.
 * Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” Critical Inquiry 30, (Winter 2004)

 * One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger.
 * Emmanuel Lévinas, Heidegger's pre-WWII colleague at University of Freiburg, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. p. 25

 * It is rather difficult to describe Heidegger’s face because he could never look straight into one’s eyes for long. His natural expression revealed a reflective brow, an inscrutable countenance, and downcast eyes, which now and again would cast a quick glance to assess the situation. Forced, in conversation, to look one straight in the face, he would appear reserved and insecure, for he lacked the gift of candid communication with other people. Hence his natural expression was one of cautious, peasant-sly mistrust
 * Karl Löwith, Heidegger’s colleague, as quoted in Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, p. 11.

 * [T]he tenor of Derridian philosophy shares with Heidegger’s a dangerous proclivity towards the bombastic translations of problems of being and knowledge into strident moral dilemmas. Like the cosmic drama of Being repressed by being in Heidegger, Derrida’s protests against phonocentrism sound more like lay sermonizing than genuine analytical argument.
 * J.G. Merquior (1986). From Paris to Prague: A Critique of Structuralist and Poststructualist Thought. London: Verso, ISBN 0-86091-129-2, pp 226

 * The thing I object to the most about Heidegger was that he was a guru. He practiced philosophy not as a Socratic practice of exchange, where you and I are equal, and it's just a matter of who has the better argument. But no, he was an authority figure, and he fed people's desire to submit themselves to authority. So I think actually his way of teaching was anti-philosophical.
 * Martha Nussbaum as stated in "Martha Nussbaum on the Value of the Humanities", Philosophy Bites podcast, December 24, 2010

 * I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger. This man was a devil. I mean, he behaved like a devil to his beloved teacher [i.e., Husserl ], and he has a devilish influence on Germany. … One has to read Heidegger in the original to see what a swindler he was.
 * Karl Popper, as quoted in "At 90, and Still Dynamic : Revisiting Sir Karl Popper and Attending His Birthday Party" by Eugene Yue-Ching Ho, in Intellectus 23 (Jul-Sep 1992)

 * Heidegger's Nazism and the failure to confront it are philosophically significant for Heidegger's philosophy, for its reception, and for philosophy itself. At a time when some are still concerned to deny the existence of the Holocaust, in effect to deny that Nazism was Nazism, and many still deny that Nazism had a more than tangential appeal to one of the most significant theories of this century, merely to assert the philosophical significance of an abject philosophical failure to seize the historical moment for the German Volk and Being is not likely to win the day. Yet there is something absurd, even grotesque about the conjunction of the statement that Heidegger is an important, even a great philosopher, perhaps one of the few seminal thinkers in the history of the tradition, with the realization that he, like many of his followers, entirely failed, in fact failed in the most dismal manner, to grasp or even to confront Nazism. If philosophy is its time captured in thought, and if Heidegger and his epigones have basically failed to grasp their epoch, can we avoid the conclusion that they have also failed this test, failed as philosophers?
 * Tom Rockmore (1992) On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 289

 * After several decades of courageous scholarship by Hugo Ott, Victor Farias and Emmanuel Faye in Europe, and related work by American scholars Thomas Sheehan, Richard Wolin, Tom Rockmore and others, no sensible observer today doubts that Heidegger, the most celebrated figure in twentieth-century German philosophy, lied his inauthentic head off about his relationship to the Nazis. Far from being a reluctant sympathizer for a brief period in the early 1930s, as he sought to convince his denazification committee, Heidegger had been an enthusiastic believer in National Socialism’s “inner truth and greatness.” He hoped to become the Fuhrer of the university system, to play philosopher-king to Hilter’s Fuhrerstaat...
 * Carlin Romano (2013), America the Philosophical, NY:Vintage, pp. 367-368

 * The philosophical tradition that goes from Descartes to Husserl, and indeed a large part of the philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato, involves a search for foundations: metaphysically certain foundations of knowledge, foundations of language and meaning, foundations of mathematics, foundations of morality, etc. […] Now, in the twentieth century, mostly under the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, we have come to believe that this general search for these sorts of foundations is misguided.
 * John Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” The New York Review of Books, 27 October 1983

 * Finally, there is Heidegger's stunning silence about the Holocaust. For the hundreds of pages that he published on the dehumanizing powers of modern civilization, for all the ink he spilled decrying the triumph of a spiritless technology, Heidegger never saw fit, as far as I know, to publish a single word on the death camps. Instead, he pleaded ignorance of the fate of the Jews during the war—even though the Jewish population of Baden, where Heidegger lived, dropped dramatically from 20,600 in 1933 to 6400 in 1940, and even though virtually all of the 6400 who remained were deported to France on October 22, 1940, and thence to Izbica, the death camp near Lublin. As Heidegger was lecturing on Nietzsche in the Forties, there were only 820 Jews left in all of Baden. We have his statements about the six million unemployed at the beginning of the Nazi regime, but not a word about the six million who were dead at the end of it.
 * Thomas Sheehan (1988) “Heidegger and the Nazis.” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 10 (June 16, 1988), pp. 38–47.

 * Was Heidegger's support for Nazism primarily a philosophical affair — indeed, a philosophical mistake — that could be easily corrected by a change in philosophical position? The opposite would seem to be the case, namely, that Heidegger's support for Hitler was intimately bound up with his own very conservative political views and his deep-seated anti-democratic and anti-modern attitudes. Since those attitudes demonstrably persist in Heidegger's thinking up to his death, to what degree is Heidegger's entire philosophy, both early and late, inextricably linked with his politics in the broadest sense, that is, with what he called the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism? […] And then there is a question of why, after the war, Heidegger chose to maintain an almost hermetic silence about his support for Hitler and the Nazis. Shouldn't the philosopher who had written so powerfully about the existential themes of responsibility, resoluteness, and authenticity have had at least something to say about his own personal responsibility for his actions during the Third Reich rather than glossing over the matter by blaming everything and everyone else?
 * Thomas Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi,” New York Review of Books, 14 Jan 1993.

 * Existentialism is a school of philosophic thought. The name is not like Platonism, Epicureanism, and Thomism. Existentialism is a nameless movement like pragmatism or positivism. This is deceptive. Existentialism owes its overriding significance to a single man: Heidegger. Heidegger alone brought about such a radical change in philosophic thought as is revolutionizing all thought in Germany, in continental Europe, and is beginning to affect even Anglo-Saxony. I am not surprised by this effect. I remember the impression he made on me when I heard him first as a young Ph.D. in 1922. Up to that time I had been particularly impressed, as many of my contemporaries in Germany were, by Max Weber, by Weber's intransigent devotion to intellectual honesty, by his passionate devotion to the idea of science, a devotion that was combined with a profound uneasiness regarding the meaning of science. On my way north from Freiburg where Heidegger then taught, I saw in Frankfurt am Main Franz Rosenzweig whose name will always be remembered when informed people speak about Existentialism, and I told him of Heidegger. I said to him: in comparison with Heidegger, Weber appeared to me as an orphan child in regard to precision, and probing, and competence. I had never seen before such seriousness, profundity, and concentration in the interpretation of philosophic texts.
 * Leo Strauss, "Existentialism", lecture in February 1956, published in Intreprataion: A Journal of Political Philosophy Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring 1995)

 * Existentialism is a "movement" which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger. To that thought alone existentialism owes its importance or intellectual respectability. There is no room for political philosophy in Heidegger's work, and this may well be due to the fact that the room in question is occupied by gods or the gods.
 * Leo Strauss, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy", Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1971)

 * Among the many things that make Heidegger's thought so appealing to so many contemporaries is his accepting the premise that while human life and thought is radically historical, History is not a rational process. As a consequence, he denies that one can understand a thinker better than he understood himself and even as he understood himself: a great thinker will understand an earlier thinker of rank creatively, i.e. by transforming his thought, and hence by understanding him differently than he understood himself. One could hardly observe this transformation if one could not see the original form. Above all, according to Heidegger all thinkers prior to him have been oblivious of the true ground of all grounds, the fundamental abyss. This assertion implies the claim that in the decisive respect Heidegger understands his great predecessors better than they understood themselves.
 * Leo Strauss, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy", Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1971)

 * Ignoring not only the sciences but the whole of the Western tradition since Plato caused Heidegger to remain too caught up in traditional metaphysics, from which only self-reflection could bring release.
 * Ralph Wiggershaus (1995). The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, MIT Press, p. 595.

 * Two philosophers in particular have had an inordinate influence over the way contemporary literary theorists think. Nietzsche, the greatest misogynist of modern times, is the inspiration for those post-modern and post-structuralist sentiments that culminated in Michel Foucault's famous image of man as a figure in the sand about to be washed away by the next severe wave. Meanwhile, Heidegger, who has served as a source of ideas for those involved in the deep ecology movement as well as for many who work in artificial intelligence, has also exerted strong influence over recent movements in literary theory that question humanistic premises about the use of texts to reinforce moral meanings. Deconstruction in particular strives, as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut put it, "to be fundamentally more Heideggerian than Heidegger himself," rooting out whatever last vestiges of humanism it can find in Heidegger's thought.
 * Alan Wolfe, The Human Difference: Animals, Computers, and the Necessity of Social Science (1993), Ch. 1. A Distinct Science for a Distinct Species

 * Heidegger is 'great' not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement...
 * Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), as quoted by Adam Kirsch, "The Deadly Jester", The New Republic, December 2, 2008

title: Martin Heidegger


text:
Theo de Raadt

Theo de Raadt (May 19 1968) is a Canadian computer security expert, programmer, a founder of NetBSD and the founder of OpenBSD.

Quotes

 * The world doesn't live off jam and fancy perfumes - it lives off bread and meat and potatoes. Nothing changes. All the big fancy stuff is sloppy stuff that crashes. I don't need dancing baloney - I need stuff that works. That's not as pretty, and just as hard.

 * I actually am fairly uncomfortable about it, even if our firm stipulation was that they cannot tell us what to do. We are simply doing what we do anyways — securing software — and they have no say in the matter. I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile doesn't get built.
 * Quoted in
 * on receiving a monetary grant from the US military.

 * Low code quality keeps haunting our entire industry. That, and sloppy programmers who don't understand the frameworks they work within. They're like plumbers high on glue.
 * Quoted in

 * Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.
 * Quoted in

 * So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.
 * Quoted in

 * This is a software monopoly but at least it was written by people who care about security, so it's not like Microsoft's monopoly.
 * speaking about OpenSSH.
 * speaking about OpenSSH.

 * It's terrible, everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'
 * Quoted in
 * on the quality of the code of the Linux kernel

 * Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix.
 * Quoted in

 * I think it is astounding that people could argue for "you just must trust someone else to fix it" instead of "you could fix it yourself, or hire someone to fix it." There is a contractor base out there that can solve these problems as well as or better than the major vendors could. But I think the major vendors are still having more luck at getting the ear of the press.

 * Well, we do not do this so that other players can make profit. We've actually been doing this for a long time and I do not know of anyone who specifically makes money off OpenBSD. They may, at best, save some money by not having to re-engineer the same software that we have already written. It is not exactly that we are letting them make a profit, but that we are doing a proper job and saving someone else from having to do the same job in a corporate setting. In our eyes, that is perhaps a waste of planet-wide engineer talents, rewriting the same thing over and over. Why can’t we just get it right once?

 * What's so exciting is to be able to just take something and polish it so much that hopefully in the future people will start borrowing things from it.

 * ...you are being the usual slimy hypocritical asshole... You may have had value ten years ago, but people will see that you don't anymore.
 * To Richard Stallman
 * To Richard Stallman

 * The only way to make it clear to him that he should not come here to our lists in the future, is to teach him a hard lesson, and that is done by continually re-adding cc's back to him -- because the mails talk about him -- even when his friends come our mailing lists and delete the his address from the cc list. Like this message, which adds him back in. Richard, you are a lying cheating hypocrite.

 * [...] beer results in ideas, which results in new code.

 * It's the little things that make Freedom become Not Freedom.

 * You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.
 * on the statement "Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits"

 * Our solutions provide something that is 100% right, all the time. That is the idea. The cobbled together gunk never does [...] It's unfortunate the application-level people are all caught up in cobble, cobble, cobble and just never learn how to evolve.
 * Comparing CARP and pfsync, the OpenBSD redundant firewall solution, to a collection of shell scripts

 * But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
 * Discussing a license change in ipf and how it required its removal and replacement with another firewall in OpenBSD's base distribution

Attributed
As an easter egg, a now deleted fortune cookie feature of the mg editor that is included in OpenBSD contained a list of attributed quotes, some of which are possibly apocryphal (added in jest).

 * Last version before removal: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/mg/Attic/theo.c?rev=1.125
 * Hystory of revisions (may be related to the date when they were said): http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/mg/Attic/theo.c

Some selected examples:

 * Quite frankly, SSE's alignment requirement is the most utterly retarded idea since eating your own shit.
 * You'd be safer using Windows than the code which was just deleted.
 * Appears in a newsgroup archive.
 * Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent Multics in a browser. (paraphrasing Herny Spencer's famous quote)
 * Don't tell anybody I said that.
 * Regarding previous quotation.
 * NFS loves everyone.
 * Buttons are for idiots.
 * The kernel is a harsh mistress.
 * 35 commits an hour? That's pathetic!
 * c++ is a pile of crap
 * cat-v.org c++ considered harmful

Quotes from others about Theo de Raadt

 * On December 20 [1994], Theo de Raadt was asked to resign from the NetBSD Project by the remaining members of 'core'. This was a very difficult decision to make, and resulted from Theo's long history of rudeness towards and abuse of users and developers of NetBSD.
 * Adam Glass, NetBSD mailing list, December 23, 1994.

 * Difficult.
 * Linus Torvalds, Forbes, June 16, 2005.

 * It's widely claimed that I'm "the one" who ejected Theo from the NetBSD community. That is false. At that time in NetBSD's history, Chris G. Demetriou was playing the role of alpha male, and I wasn't even given a choice. I was certain it was going to bite us in the ass. I think the question for historians is not whether it did bite us in the ass, but how many times and how hard.
 * Charles M. Hannum, ONLamp.com, September 14, 2006.
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20170701060203/http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2006/09/14/netbsd_future.html

title: Theo de Raadt