Entries Tagged 'quote' ↓

Ah, the contempt of it. The glut of contempt we seem to have achieved. Our own disguised contempt for ‘primitives’, the contempt of those who left the Culture when the war was declared for those who chose to fight the Idirans; the contempt so many of our own people feel for Special Circumstances… the contempt we all guess the Minds must feel for us… and elsewhere; the Idirans’ contempt for us, all of us humans; and human contempt for Changers. A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.

Even the word ’science’ comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate’. The same root led to the word ’shit’, which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ’scythe’ and ’schism’, which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.

The word science comes through the Old French, and is derived from the Latin word scientia for knowledge, the nominal form of the verb scire, “to know”. The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root that yields scire is *skei-, meaning to “cut, separate, or discern”. Other words from the same root include Sanskrit chyati, “he cuts off”, Greek schizo, “I split” (hence English schism, schizophrenia), Latin scindo, “I split” (hence English rescind). From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, science or scientia meant any systematic recorded knowledge. Science therefore had the same sort of very broad meaning that philosophy had at that time. In other languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, the word corresponding to science also carries this meaning.

“All ready.” She grinned. “You got the tickets?”

I waved them. She turned to the nearest ninja, dipped her chin a bit, and turned big green eyes up at him. “Could we get a cab?”

Four ninjas howled and leapt into Lexington Avenue, waving their swords about. A yellow cab swerved left and clipped one ninja, sending him flying ten feet back to splatter on the rear of a limo. Another ninja stood and watched in shock, which meant he wasn’t going to ninja his way away from the cab, which took him like a mad bull’s horns and flipped him over the roof. The cab mounted sidewalk and jammed on the brakes just as the fender bodyslammed ninja three. The cabbie leaned over and flung open the door, which opened hard on ninja four, batting him down. Scrawled in the dirt on the door were the letters WMD. Inside was an immense black man with an X carved into his forehead. Trix and I were the last ones standing. He grinned like a kid at Christmas and yelled, “Where we going, tiny white people?”

What? The person behind all this might be a copy of me? So she was just put to sleep, that’s all… Gosh, this is just like something the Puppeteer‘d do…Wha? No brain damage? She even has frontal lobes? Wow, am I ever lucky!