“They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had engines and bullets.”

— Alastair Reynolds , book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 11 (p. 177)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "They might have their airships and machine guns, but superstition wasn’t something that went away just because you had …" by Alastair Reynolds?

Alastair Reynolds 198

British novelist and astronomer 1966

Related quotes

“He went down with three bullets in his body. That left me in command. I was right out there in the open.
And those machine guns were spitting fire and cutting down the undergrowth all around me something awful.”

Alvin C. York (1887–1964) United States Army Medal of Honor recipient

Diary of Alvin York, Account of 8 October 1918.
Context: I don't know whether it was the German major, but one yelled something out in German that we couldn't understand. And then the machine guns on top swung around and opened fire on us. There were about thirty of them. They were commanding us from a hillside less than thirty yards away. They couldn't miss. And they didn't!
They killed all of Savage's squad; they got all of mine but two; they wounded Cutting and killed two of his squad; and Early's squad was well back in the brush on the extreme right and not yet under the direct fire of the machine guns, and so they escaped. All except Early. He went down with three bullets in his body. That left me in command. I was right out there in the open.
And those machine guns were spitting fire and cutting down the undergrowth all around me something awful. And the Germans were yelling orders. You never heard such a racket in all of your life. I didn't have time to dodge behind a tree or dive into the brush, I didn't even have time to kneel or lie down.
I don't know what the other boys were doing. They claim They didn't fire a shot. They said afterwards they were on the right, guarding the prisoners. And the prisoners were lying down and the machine guns had to shoot over them to get me. As soon as the machine guns opened fire on me, I began to exchange shots with them.

“I've always felt that stylists such as you have in America are ashamed of a car and are preoccupied with making it look like something else, like a submarine or an airship…As an engineer, I revolt against this.”

Alec Issigonis (1906–1988) British car designer

The New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEEDB1231F936A35753C1A96E948260&scp=1&sq=mini+issigonis&st=nyt.

“I noticed the bushes all around where I stood in my fight with the machine guns were all cut down. The bullets went over my head and on either side. But they never touched me.”

Alvin C. York (1887–1964) United States Army Medal of Honor recipient

Account of 8 October 1918.
Diary of Alvin York

“You can kill a man with those words.
No gun.
No bullets.
Just words and a girl.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Variant: She soon says, "You're my best friend, Ed."
You can kill a man with those words.
No gun.
No bullets.
Just words and a girl.
Source: I Am the Messenger

“It seems to me that the notion of machine that was current in the course of the Industrial Revolution – and which we might have inherited – is a notion, essentially, of a machine without goal, it had no goal ‘of’, it had a goal ‘for’. And this gradually developed into the notion of machines with goals ‘of’, like thermostats, which I might begin to object to because they might compete with me. Now we’ve got the notion of a machine with an underspecified goal, the system that evolves. This is a new notion, nothing like the notion of machines that was current in the Industrial Revolution, absolutely nothing like it. It is, if you like, a much more biological notion, maybe I’m wrong to call such a thing a machine; I gave that label to it because I like to realise things as artifacts, but you might not call the system a machine, you might call it something else.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Pask (1972) in: Mary Catherine Bateson Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. New York : Alfred A Knopf. Quotes in: Usman Haque (2007) " The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/architectural_relevance_of_gordon_pask.pdf" in: Architectural Design. Vol 77, Issue 4, p. 54.