Fave SMAC quote?

[Tikhon]

Domai's epigraph at the beginning of the game is a great favorite of mine. It is classic Nechaevian Russian Nihilism (Ringleader Sergey Nechaev of the nineteenth century makes Stalin look democratic), who typically distributed propaganda through poems --- "I'll gun the flogger down" sounds like a quote.

And who doesn't like to hold a faction leader at gun point and watch them unload whatever their worth to you, sign a truce, then repeat until they grovel. It's also a joy after they try to surrender to select "destroying your faction will do a service to humanity". If only I could interrogate Miriam ...

[Mr. President]

My favorite quote is (I think) the blurb for The Will to Power:

"Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous going across, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What can be loved in man is that he is a bridge and not an end; what is great in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, for they are those who cross over."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra"

I don't believe in Nietzsche's brand of nihilism, but I love that quote! It's almost as good as the ending of The Once and Future King .

[Black Sunrise]

That Lal quote is good. It stands to reason that they were going to use it for Stockpile Energy because minerals to energy fits that. I wonder why it didn't get in?

Because Stockpile Energy is the only base facility that is never completed. And you get the voiceovers when the facility is completed. So there is never a trigger for the Stockpile Energy .mp3 to play.

Indra

[Admiral]

I will have to vote for another Miriam Godwinson one.

"Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry god, and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem."
Sister Miriam Godwinson
But for the grace of God

[Adalbertus]

Sorry, I read this forum only occasionally, but there is the answer to Alznyia's question #1 (after three weeks, finally):
No, electrons do not consist of quarks. These are only protons and neutrons, which consist of three quarks, and some stranger particles. Electrons are too light (a thousandth of the proton mass) for consisting of quarks.

[Dictatress]

My favorite was when I asked Lal to vote for me in an election. After settling the payment, he asked me whether I wanted him to vote yea or nay. He's a sly one!

[Alynzia]

Thank you Adalbertus for the answer to my question. If electrons are not made out of quarks, surely Zakharov's blurb is wrong, isn't it? Behind atoms we find electrons. Yes, but since they are so small, wouldn't it have been smarter to say protons, then the quarks bit later would have been correct. I will be unable to admire Zakharov any more, even though I'm sure the universe regresses infinetely in magnitude as Zakharov's point was. (Oh, what do you mean he is fictional? Get out of here!)

Also, thank you to Black Sunrise for answering a question and a query of mine. That is appreciated.

I'm off to find out what electrons are made out...

Alynzia.

[Adalbertus]

wouldn't it have been smarter to say protons, then the quarks bit later would have

Maybe it yould have been. But what is one more step of regression when you claim an infinity? The paradoxon: The smaller the particlesyou want to detect, the higher energies you need. And the more easily they are destroyed or obscured by other effects. In the sixties one believed to have found more fundamental particles and later it was discovered that they were some sort of "resonances" of more fundamental, and already known, particles. Unfortunately I don't know all the details.

'm off to find out what electrons are made out...

Then you'll have to join an army pf physicists who want to know this also. Up to now there is no (widely accepted) theory which predicts particles electrons consist of. And if so, these are strange, eleven-dimensional constructs. If only we lived in one (Zak).

To contribute at least a bit to the topic:
My favourites are the dementi on Retroviral Engineering, just when you're about discovering it, and the blurb to The Network Backbone which might be a citation of soMe well-known $oftware company on getting a quasi-monopoly...

[vitamin j]

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Datalinks

Love those lines. (From paradise garden). Also from Secrets of Alpha Centauri:

You waited so long to heed us, earthdeirdre, almost we pruned you, as we may yet prune your branches.

Lady Deirdre Skye
"Conversations with Planet"

I have to agree with those above citing Miriam as well. She's got some good quotes for such an insane fanatic!

vitamin j

[Mr. President]

Erm, Tikhon, if I'm not mistaken, Domai's epigraph is from the poem "Jim Jones", which is about the penal colony at Sydney in Australia. I don't think it has anything to do with Russia. (As far as I know, there's no such place as Botany Bay, Siberia.)

I actually like that Paradise Garden thing as well. Ethical Calculus is good too:

"Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean."
--Aristotle, "Nicomachean Ethics"

The Greeks are my favorite ancient civilization, and they thought of many things that are still relevant now. Perhaps even more so.