Top 35 Ian McDonald Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”

— Ian McDonald

2. “Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.”

— Ian McDonald

3. “The present is an illusion.”

— Ian McDonald

5. “We always thought the robot apocalypse would be fleets of killer drones and war mecha the size of apartment blocks and terminators with red eyes. Not a row of mechanised checkouts.”

— Ian McDonald

6. “Where there are drones, there will always be police. Where there are police, there will always be violence.”

— Ian McDonald

7. “The exoneration of the mass. No one voice is to blame. But his voice was there.”

— Ian McDonald

8. “In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK-47s.”

— Ian McDonald

9. “Coffee is a drink for grownups. No kid ever likes coffee. It’s psychoactive. Coffee is the drug of memory.”

— Ian McDonald

10. “Well, the human genome has massive redundancy – that means that two per cent of the DNA does all the work of instructing the ribosomes that build the proteins that make up the cells of your body. Ninety-eight per cent of your DNA just sits there doing nothing. Taking up space in the gene.”

— Ian McDonald

11. “We always thought the robot apocalypse would be fleets of killer drones and war mecha the size of apartment blocks and terminators with red eyes. Not a row of mechanised checkouts in the local Extra and the alco station; online banking; self-driving taxis; an automated triage system in the hospital. One by one, the bots came and replaced us.”

— Ian McDonald

12. “There’s never been a rule of human behavior that hasn’t been broken by someone, somewhere, sometime, in some circumstance mundane or spectacular. To be human is to transcend the rules.”

— Ian McDonald

13. “He’s never fought with religion; what is the point of railing against such beauty, such intimate theatre, such chime of eternity? He can treasure it without believing in it.”

— Ian McDonald

14. “The geek of the Earth are a tribe and they are mighty.”

— Ian McDonald

15. “The sense of power, of human ability, was so strong. Many of the men cried. Men are so easily moved.”

— Ian McDonald

16. “The might and magic of money is not what it allows you to own; it is what it allows you to be. Money is freedom.”

— Ian McDonald

17. “Handsome boys fighting in not many clothes. Even better than handsome boys marrying.”

— Ian McDonald

18. “Language and how close it comes to truth, and how far away it is.”

— Ian McDonald

19. “Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached.”

— Ian McDonald

20. “Her face had always held too much personality to be merely beautiful.”

— Ian McDonald

21. “Najia can feel yts subdermal activators against her forearm. Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute. Another way of being human, speaking a phsyical language she does not understand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this body next to hers is loyal, tough, funny courageous, clever, kind, sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. All you could wish in a friend of the soul. Or a lover.”

— Ian McDonald

22. “Bullets are incompatible with pressurised environments and complex machinery.”

— Ian McDonald

23. “This was defeat. This was failure; a quiet, ashen world. True humility and obedience, where the knee is bowed to the inevitable, the ring is kissed without pride or restraint.”

— Ian McDonald

24. “Under a sky the color of judgment.”

— Ian McDonald

25. “You collect art: you must know that the miniature artists, at the end of careers spent painting the tiniest, most exacting details that no one would ever look at, would often put their eyes out with needles. Too much beauty, yes, but also too much seeing. They were tired of seeing. The dark was safe and warm and comfortable. Blindness was a gift. I still have seeing to do.”

— Ian McDonald

26. “Everyone has a camera on their phone and no one sees UFOs anymore.”

— Ian McDonald

27. “Time was, time will be again.”

— Ian McDonald

28. “Escape, son, may not be the way,” says Mr. Spider. “It would be reassuring if everything was finally reducible to Light versus Darkness, Order versus Chaos, Good versus Evil. However, life is not pulp fantasy. If the Way were easy, what virtue would there be in following it? The teaching of the Daishi is that the Way does not lie in escape, or even in defeating.”

— Ian McDonald

29. “Cibelle understood how the trick was done, how to add your own little ripple to the crest of the hip and watch the chaotic mathematics of storms and power laws magnify it into a fashion wave.”

— Ian McDonald

30. “The prices are vertiginous. Carlinhos and Wagner take a booth and they talk and dip their wafers of exquisite beef into the sauces but most of the time they keep companionable silence together, as close men do, and find they have communicated everything. Run.”

— Ian McDonald

31. “Nothing tells you that you are not on Earth anymore than exhaling at one price and inhaling at another.”

— Ian McDonald

32. “If God truly were inside you, could you bear to look at it? Necdet says.”

— Ian McDonald

33. “The time is short and the hills is dark and I’s got miles to go before I sleeps. Is is no easy road.”

— Ian McDonald

34. “Loss bites and pulls. It is a thing of hooks sunk into every part of you, parts that you would not think could feel loss like thumbs and lips, hooks moored to wind and memory so that slightest disturbance, the slightest act of recall, tugs at those fine lines. Red is the colour of loss and its smell is like burned roses.”

— Ian McDonald

35. “Striving, straining for the clouds, she could hear the voices in the manswarm below shouting, “Never do it, never make it, too far, too high, too much,” and she shouted down to them, “Of course I can, of course I will, watch me, watch me!”

— Ian McDonald

36. “The implants just give you a new set of reproductive-free imperatives, that’s all. The rest, thank the gods, is up to you. They wouldn’t be worth anything if they didn’t give rise to the most troubling and complex problems of the heart. They are what makes all this glory, this madness worthwhile. We are born to the trouble as sparks fly upwards, that is what is great about us, man, woman, transgen, nute.”

— Ian McDonald

37. “There are too many books in the world.”

— Ian McDonald