Stephen Baxter: Timing

Stephen Baxter is author. Explore interesting quotes on timing.

Stephen Baxter: 110 quotes1 like

“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.”

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 10, “Assemblies of good fellows” (p. 95)

“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.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 6 “The Crossing” section IV (p. 185)

“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.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (pp. 370-371)

“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.”

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 15, “The world was tired out with geological theories” (p. 160)

“The river of time flowed unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.”

Stephen Baxter book Ring

Source: Ring (1994), Chapter 35 (p. 891; closing words)

“Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating.”

Stephen Baxter book Ring

Source: Ring (1994), Chapter 30 (p. 852)

“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.”

Stephen Baxter book Ring

Source: Ring (1994), Chapter 27 (p. 825)

“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.”

Stephen Baxter book Flux

He bit into his cake. “And that’s still true today; as true as it ever was.”

Flux (novel) (1993), Chapter 20 (p. 497)

“Time stretches like a lazy leopard when it wants to.”

Stephen Baxter book Vacuum Diagrams

More Than Time or Distance (p. 161)
Short fiction, Vacuum Diagrams (1997)