Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 10, “Lifetimes of Chance” (p. 188)
“As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.”
“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 741)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three
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Neal Stephenson 167
American science fiction writer 1959Related quotes

“I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.”
Source: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
The Value of Science (1955)

Preface
The Book of Nothing (2009)
Context: The spooky ether was persistent. It took an Einstein to remove it from the Universe.... Gradually, over the last twenty years, the vacuum has turned out to be more unusual, more fluid, less empty, and less intangible than even Einstein could have imagined. Its presence is felt on the very smallest and largest dimensions over which the forces of Nature act.

“The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.”

Proletariatis Brdzola August 1905, as quoted in Young Stalin (2007) by Simon Sebag Montefiore, p. 376
Contemporary witnesses