If you’re still holding your parents liable for your problems at the age of forty, then one can argue that you’re so immature you practically deserve them.

Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died.

It’s easier to stick to your pledges 100 percent of the time rather than 99 percent.
 

Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.

 

"Look,” said Tyrena. “In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

 

“Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments."

 

Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.
 

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.

If you want to receive a letter, you need to send a letter!

A lot of times, the real motivation is different from what people say is the real motivation. For example, buying expensive headphones, they are not really to make you hear better. You want to signal to the world that you are affluent and you have status and good taste.

The greatest threat to a service is the team that operates it.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Knowledge is not free. You have to pay attention.

He who angers you, conquers you.

Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else.

Remember that what ultimately matters is not technical excellence but market penetration. The two rarely go hand-in-hand.

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?

Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal.
Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.