Author Topic: Escape Pod Poll Quotes Poll  (Read 3927 times)

Swamp

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on: September 08, 2010, 07:12:16 PM
Just in case you are still hooked on voting, I thought I'd see which quotes were the favorite.  Read them below:

- Group1-
"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing." - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

- Group2-
"I am your enemy, the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher." - Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

-Group3-
“One, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; Three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.” Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

-Group4-
“Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my... well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a... tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what's this roaring sound, whooshing past what I'm suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It'll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I'm dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There's an awful lot of that now isn't it? And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me? Hello Ground!” - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

-Group5-
“A world is supported by four things ... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing ... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!” - Frank Herbert, Dune

-Group6-
"The ultimate badge of prestige at The Palace is to be chosen as wizard. Wizards possess special abilities that ordinary members don't (like being able to kill, gag, and pin misbehaving users). They also participate in decision-making about new policies for the community. Many members, secretly or not, wish they could attain the social recognition, power, and self-esteem achieved through this promotion. To get it, one must demonstrate commitment to the community, which includes spending a considerable amount of time there. Wizardship can become a very enticing carrot that stimulates addictive attendance. For those few who do attain that position, it can powerfully reinforce one's efforts, and further bolsters one's loyalty and devotion to Palace life. Even though the position does not include a salary, many wizards see it as a job to which they are responsible. The wizard now has a viable reason for being so "addicted." As one user stated the day after receiving his surprise promotion, 'I WORK here.'" - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

-Group7-
"You do what you have to do to give people closure; it makes them feel better and it doesn’t cost you much to do it.  I’d rather apologize for something I didn’t really care about and leave someone on Earth wishing me well."  - John Scalzi, Old Man’s War

- Group8-
"With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two." - Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

-Group9-
"This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine." - Michael Crichton, Sphère

- Group10-
"So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair…So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything..."Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

- Group11-
"This very personal relationship, ‘value’, has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him… and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him.  There is an old song which asserts that ‘the best things in life are free’.  Not true!  Utterly false!  This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted… and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears."Robert H. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

- Group12-
"Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?" - Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

- Group13-
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the [absolute leader]. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all."Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

- Group14-
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

- Group15-
"Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time rich and cash poor." - Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

-Group16-
“The Gods do not protect fools.  Fools are protected by more capable fools.”Larry Niven, Ringworld

- Group17-
"He slept like an animal, well and lightly, faced in the opposite direction from that of a man; for a man going to sleep is about to escape into it while animals are prepared to escape out of it." - Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

- Group18-
“Davis and Peters couldn’t even get to the right year.  It took me four tries to get this close.  The first time I came through, I landed on the nineteenth.  The second time I ended up in the middle of December.  The third time I ended up spot-on target, right month, right day, ten minutes before the raid started.  And in the middle of a field of marshmallows halfway to Birmingham.”Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

-QuarterFinal1-
“By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are.  For neither do men live nor die in vain.”H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

- QuarterFinal2-
"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it... All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children." - George Orwell, 1984

- QuarterFInal3-
“Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this.  I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.  I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.  I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.  And I want to help you.” - Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

- QuarterFInal4-
"He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. He had labored to take man to the stars, and, in a moment of success, the stars - the aloof - indifferent stars - had come to him. This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now: only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Reinhold's brain: The human race was no longer alone." - Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

- QuarterFInal5-
"Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"

"That we shall die."

"Yes, There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

- QuarterFInal 6-
"I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers."
- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

- Semi Final 1-
"We are only seeking Man.  We have no need of other worlds.  We need mirrors.  We don't know what to do with other worlds.  A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.  We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.  At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence.  We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it any more." - Stanisław Lem, Solaris

- Semi Final 2-
"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst.  In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title.  Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.  Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.  Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach.  Check your road and the nature of your battle.  The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

-Final Round-
"The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night."Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

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Ocicat

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Reply #1 on: September 09, 2010, 06:22:27 AM
There are a few too many entries here - perhaps it should be cut down into a few sub-groups and some quarterfinals, and...

*runs and hides*



Swamp

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Reply #2 on: September 09, 2010, 12:47:42 PM
There are a few too many entries here - perhaps it should be cut down into a few sub-groups and some quarterfinals, and...

*runs and hides*

Yeah, whatever, just vote and like it, dangit.  ;D

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Swamp

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Reply #3 on: September 13, 2010, 12:40:40 PM
Wow, only 8 votes; I guess people are burnt out.  Not that this poll matters all that much.  It's just for fun.  Interesting that my two Bradbury bookend quotes are so far two of the top picks, not that I'm complaining, they are good.

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Swamp

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Reply #4 on: September 14, 2010, 06:41:10 PM
Just over 24 hours to vote for your favorite sf quote from the EP flash fiction polls.

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Bill

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Reply #5 on: September 15, 2010, 12:03:20 AM
are we going to have a best band name to emerge from forum posting poll after this?



Swamp

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Reply #6 on: September 15, 2010, 12:43:28 AM
Sure.  Go for it.

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Bill

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Reply #7 on: September 16, 2010, 09:00:11 PM
Wow, only 8 votes; I guess people are burnt out.  Not that this poll matters all that much.  It's just for fun.  Interesting that my two Bradbury bookend quotes are so far two of the top picks, not that I'm complaining, they are good.
Maybe I'm just a sucker for Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451 was the first book my father ever bought me), but I loved that you bookend this story with his quotes.



Swamp

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Reply #8 on: September 16, 2010, 10:01:53 PM
Wow, only 8 votes; I guess people are burnt out.  Not that this poll matters all that much.  It's just for fun.  Interesting that my two Bradbury bookend quotes are so far two of the top picks, not that I'm complaining, they are good.
Maybe I'm just a sucker for Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451 was the first book my father ever bought me), but I loved that you bookend this story with his quotes.

Bradbury is a favortie of mine as well.  Bradbury and Wells were the only one with more than one quote.

I should also note that the Douglas Adams and Phillip K. Dick quotes also voted as the most liked.

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Bill

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Reply #9 on: September 17, 2010, 03:15:23 AM
that was my third vote... the Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep quote, but I found myself biased to vote for the writers I loved. Though I'm not sure why I didn't vote for Hitchhikers or Dune.
« Last Edit: September 17, 2010, 03:21:03 AM by Bill »