All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

— Vernor Vinge

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.

— Vernor Vinge

Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.

— Vernor Vinge

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but almost everybody else agreed it made you daft.

— Vernor Vinge

Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, she’d revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, and—after it was founded—to the Executive Council. Reinna had kept her mouth shut about the surveillance suite; she and the Children were trapped on a world of medieval strangers.... So at the beginning Reinna had kept some secrets. It was now years too late to reveal this one. In the Beyond, “cameras” were more than what early tech civilizations imagined. Cameras could be a coat of paint, or critters that looked like insects, or even a bacterial infection. Delivery of the information to the observer could be even stranger, a diffuse cloud of perturbations—acoustic, visual, thermal—that took enormous processing to reconstruct.

— Vernor Vinge

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.

— Vernor Vinge

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.

— Vernor Vinge

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

— Vernor Vinge

It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years when the summers do not burn, and the winters are not yet overly fierce. Furthermore, it is the classic time of romance. Furthermore, it's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. Furthermore, it's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.

— Vernor Vinge

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

— Vernor Vinge