Top 100 Peter F. Hamilton Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Walk the poor bloke past the station doctor, get the certificate signed, lock him up in a padded room, and supply him with good drugs.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

52. “Forty-two.” “Excuse me?” I queried. “Old joke,” the cardinal admitted. “The number of angels that can actually dance on a pinhead.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

53. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing here. Send your invasion force halfway across the galaxy so they can build a five star ski resort? That’s crazy.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

54. “If you want to understand how a government works, the laws tell you.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

55. “Interpretation though the filters of ideology has always been one of our race’s curses.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

56. “I doubt any system that won’t reveal its purpose, that only offers promises of a better tomorrow.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

57. “It’s not a god he worships, it’s the devil.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

58. “You’ve no idea how wonderful toilet paper is until it’s taken away from you by an unfeeling universe. I think it’s the defining characteristic of human civilization, the ability to manufacture something decent to wipe your ass on.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

59. “National and regional governments were committing vast resources into combating the biosphere breakdown. Social welfare, infrastructure administration, health care, and security – the fields government used to devote its efforts to – were all slowly being starved of tax money and sold off to private industry. It.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

60. “Only people with one short life want to go tearing out into the great unknown with nothing more than a flashlight and a stick to poke the rattlers with.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

61. “Start taking money away from the privileged, and they can turn just as savage as any animal that gets shoved into Philippa’s arena.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

62. “Their electronics are still back in the Stone Age.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

63. “Another religious fanatic to whom facts and reality took second place to dogma.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

64. “I don’t understand why you need verbal trickery to ensnare a temporary mate,” Tochee said. “Are you not attracted to each other by what you are?”

— Peter F. Hamilton

65. “Any species possessing this kind of knowledge base is best left unannoyed.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

66. “Always demand proof of nirvana before you start following messiahs who’re selling it to you. Those guys don’t exactly have the greatest track record in the universe.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

67. “Thoale alone knows why suicides are so fond of jumping off cliffs and bridges; they wouldn’t if they knew what that trip’s like.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

68. “Think of it as an eight-dimensional onion.’ Justine straightened her back and gave her father an exasperated look. ‘Thanks, Dad. That’s helpful. I always think in those terms, it really helps a lot.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

69. “Don’t worry. The chaps train for civil disobedience suppression. We’ll crack a few heads, chuck some of the would-be revolutionaries in jail, and the rest will slink off back to their hovels and drink themselves stupid all night. And if worse comes to worst, well, we’ve got all the guns, haven’t we?”

— Peter F. Hamilton

70. “I knew I’d get stick.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

71. “That was the trouble with history, Oscar thought: Once the distance had grown long enough, any event could be seen favorably. The true horror faded with time, and ignorance replaced it.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

72. “Justine watched two azure moons traverse the sparkling smear of Wall stars. They were in very strange orbits. And moving impossibly fast – actually accelerating. ‘Oh my God,’ she gasped. The Raiel’s planet-sized DF machines were flying into new positions. ‘The Raiel are getting ready for the last fight,’ Ehasz said numbly. ‘If they lose, that monster will consume the whole galaxy.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

73. “Taxis are useful in this town, aren’t they?” Clayton mused. “So perfectly anonymous. And they all look the same.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

74. “I’m an appropriate companion personality for a girl your age, young missy. We spent all night ransacking that library to see what I should be like. You got any idea what it’s like watching eight million hours of Disney AVs?”

— Peter F. Hamilton

75. “That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

76. “Kelly was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole assignment. Like all war correspondents, she supposed. Being on the ground was very different to sitting in the office anticipating being on the ground. Especially with the appearance of that red cloud.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

77. “Typical case, educated way, way beyond her IQ, with ambition stronger than ability. She’s just another cause fascist, son, and that’s the worst kind; they always know they’re right. Anyone who dissents for whatever reason is evil and an enemy, existing only to be crushed.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

78. “Memories do not hurt, they only influence.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

79. “It took eight generations of cousins marrying to produce you.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

80. “It was always a puzzle, given that he spent his days achieving nothing, that he had no time for anything.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

81. “Ian chuckled. “You know what the world’s greatest oxymoron is?” “Happily married,” Sid said wearily.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

82. “Violence: the brutish solution of the ignorant who know they could never get enough people to vote for them.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

83. “That’s a huge gamble.” “We’re long past the time for careful certainty.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

84. “All it’s done is create a separate culture – which, incidentally, never stops whining on about its superiority. That always ends well.” “Then it is not unusual for such a culture to be subject to attack from ideological rivals.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

85. “Everybody in the GE used secondaries. It was part of the culture now; socially acceptable. There had been many attempts by the Brussels parliament to legislate against it, and the Tax Bureau certainly did its best. But of course, if a method had been found to clear up people’s finances and put them on a hundred per cent legitimate, transparent basis, it would have worked for everyone, politicians and tax officials included.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

86. “Would being completely alone in a universe bring a sensation of closing limitations or infinitely expanding horizons with associated loneliness?”

— Peter F. Hamilton

87. “Without education and understanding, the barbarians would have outnumbered us and swarmed the city gates a long time ago.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

88. “That’s just to start?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Giu. So what happens after that?’ ‘Whatever needs to happen. That’s the whole point of being strategic.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

89. “The biggest victory they can have is to change our lives. I am going to carry on exactly as before. Anything else is allowing them to win.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

90. “Any sentient entity who has lived, has changed.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

91. “Why do they both refer to your deity while mating?” Tochee inquired as it munched on some rehydrated cabbage. “Is it a request for a blessing?”

— Peter F. Hamilton

92. “We can look at the whole concept of God and spirituality from a vantage point built on logic and physics. Under such an intensive scientific scrutiny, religion always fails. Our knowledge of quantum cosmology is now sufficiently advanced to eliminate the notion of God altogether. The universe is an entirely natural phenomenon, if extraordinarily complex. It was not created by an external act of will.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

93. “Civilization was a blessing you never truly appreciated until it threatened to collapse around you.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

94. “Political policies determine how the human race confronts this crisis. War doesn’t have that ability. War has only one outcome. War is stupid, Ralph. It is the desecration of the human spirit, martyring yourself for someone else’s dream. It is for people who do not believe in themselves.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

95. “A large part of evolution is interaction. Isolation is not evolution; it is stagnation.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

96. “If smart people are in the minority, doesn’t that make us slaves to the majority stupids?”

— Peter F. Hamilton

97. “Bunch of twats,’ Uncle Gordon calls them. ‘Retired men with way too much time on their hands. It’s people like them who started the Nazi party, you know?”

— Peter F. Hamilton

98. “Our society is mature. Change is instability. That is why every institution we have resists change. To maintain the status quo is our sole objective in life.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

99. “Chan got 63 percent in last term’s science exam, and really truly believed because of that he understood science.”

— Peter F. Hamilton

100. “Beyond them, sat Soi Hon, who was a veteran of early-twenty-first century bush wars, an ecological agitator, he called himself. Annette gathered his battles hadn’t been fought along national lines, but rather corporate ones.”

— Peter F. Hamilton