Golden Son
Highlights
“I drink to forget about men like you.”
I understand there is power in being practical, in owning things. People. Ideas. Infrastructure. So much more important than money. So much more insidious than… spaceships and razors. Tell me, does a ship matter if you can’t supply and transport the food to feed its crew?
“…imagine media as a pipeline to a city in the desert.” He waves around. “Our metaphorical desert. I can provide only thirty percent of the content of what comes through that pipeline, but I can affect one hundred percent of it. My water contaminates the rest. That is the nature of media. Do I want this city in the desert to hallucinate? Do I want its inhabitants to writhe in pain? Do I want them to rise up?”
He always thinks because I’m reading, I’m not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.
“Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.”
“I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind—how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.”
“That’s what Society does—spread the blame so there is no villain, so it’s futile to even begin to find a villain, to find justice. It’s just machinery. Processes. And it rumbles on, inexorable till a whole generation rises that will throw themselves on the gears.”
“Gold did not rise out of chance. We rose out of necessity. Out of chaos, born from a species that devoured its planet instead of investing in the future. Pleasure over all, damn the consequences. The brightest minds enslaved to an economy that demanded toys instead of space exploration or technologies that could revolutionize our race. They created robots, neutering the work ethic of mankind, creating generations of entitled locusts. Countries hoarded their resources, suspicious of one another. There grew to be twenty different factions with nuclear weapons. Twenty—each ruled by greed or zealotry.”