Been disenchanted with the Dust 514 quote stream of late and it got me thinking about the use of really awesome quotations in other games. The below are taken from the eminently quotable Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which remains a profound game in its own right even after all these years. When I read them now, I am struck by a variety of character concepts and interesting story seeds that could be applied to New Eden. After all, a good helping of :grimdark: was hidden just beneath the surface in much of Alpha Centauri. What do you think? And do you have any other inspirational quotes that have (or might) shaped your characters or storylines?
Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
-Academician Prokhor Zakharov
The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist. Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say "It cannot be done."
-Academician Prokhor Zakharov, University Commencement
The Academician's private residences shall remain off-limits to the Genetic Inspectors. We possess no retroviral capability, we are not researching retroviral engineering, and we shall not allow this Council to violate faction privileges in the name of this ridiculous witch hunt!"
-Fedor Petrov, Vice Provost for University Affairs
(Heard after the player researches Retroviral Engineering)
What actually transpires beneath the veil of an event horizon?
Decent people shouldn't think too much about that.
-Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted The Fruit"
To map the very stuff of life; to look into the genetic mirror and watch a million generations march past. That, friends, is both our curse and our proudest achievement. For it is in reaching to our beginnings that we begin to learn who we truly are.
-Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Address to the Faculty"
The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.
-Sister Miriam Godwinson, "A Blessed Struggle"
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"
The Morgans fear what may not be purchased, for a trader cannot comprehend a thing that is priceless.
-Sister Miriam Godwinson, "The Collected Sermons"
And so we return again to the holy void. Some say this is simply our destiny, but I would have you remember always that the void EXISTS, just as surely as you or I. Is nothingness any less a miracle than substance?
-Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent"
Men in their arrogance claim to understand the nature of creation, and devise elaborate theories to describe its behavior. But always they discover in the end that God was quite a bit more clever than they thought.
-Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent"
Will we next create false gods to rule over us?
How proud we have become, and how blind.
-Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent"
And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?
-Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent"
Already we have turned all of our critical industries, all of our material resources, over to these...things...these lumps of silver and paste we call nanorobots. And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need for us?
-Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent"
^ The Lord's Believers (Godwinson's faction) might as well be speaking Amarrian, and there are some interesting perspectives and objections to advanced science to be found in that voice
Information, the first principle of warfare, must form the foundation of all your efforts. Know, of course, thine enemy. But in knowing him do not forget above all to know thyself. The commander who embraces this totality of battle shall win even with inferior force.
-Spartan Battle Manual
Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die.
Why should the future be different?
-Col. Corazon Santiago "Planet: A Survivalist's Guide"
A ship at sea is its own world. To be the captain of a ship is to be the unquestionable ruler of that world and requires all of the leadership skills of a prince or minister.
-Col. Corazon Santiago, "Leadership and the Sea"
A handsome young cyborg named Ace,
Wooed women at every base,
But once ladies glanced at his special enhancement,
They vanished with nary a trace.
-Barracks Graffiti, Sparta Command
I loved my chosen. How then to face the day when she left me?
So I took from her body a single cell, perhaps to love her again.
-Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Time of Bereavement"
I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine - just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness. Dark. Rigid. Cold. Alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.
-Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Man and Machine"
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
-Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
^ Ironically, probably my second favorite quote from the game
I hold a scrap of paper in the darkness and light it. I watch it burn bright and curl, disappearing into nothingness, and the heat burns my fingers. Where has it gone? What has it become? I cannot shake the feeling that I have witnessed a form of transcendence.
-Commissioner Pravin Lal, "The Convergence"
The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI, obscures the true horror of this monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds.
They are creating their own private army of demons.
-Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Report on Human Rights"
^ Capsuleers?
Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"
If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life's fundamental truth: that life's only purpose is life itself.
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"
What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"
Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group and the greater race are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment.
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"
It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people.
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Ethics for Tomorrow"
My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?
-Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"
^ Chairman Yang, are you in danger of becoming Sansha?
Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary but competition for limited resources remains a constant. Need as well as greed has followed us to the stars and the rewards of wealth still await those wise enough to recognize this deep thrumming of our common pulse.
-CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign: televids, touchbooks, holos, psi-tours -- the works. People need heroes. They don't need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers.
-Morgan Stellartots Keynote Speech, "Mythology for Profit"
And when at last it is time for the transition from megacorporation to planetary government, from entrepreneur to emperor, it is then that the true genius of our strategy shall become apparent, for energy is the lifeblood of this society and when the chips are down he who controls the energy supply controls Planet. In former times the energy monopoly was called "The Power Company"; we intend to give this name an entirely new meaning.
-CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Centauri Monopoly"
We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding process--the childhood, if you will--that has the most far-reaching repercussions.
-Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Morgan Polysoft
Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called "moral value" of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements.
-CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed"
Some civilian workers got in among the research patients today and became so hysterical I felt compelled to have them nerve stapled. The consequence, of course, will be another public relations nightmare, but I was severely shaken by the extent of their revulsion towards a project so vital to our survival.
-CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Personal Diaries
Those who join us need only give up only half of their humanity -- the illogical, ill-tempered, and disordered half, commonly thought of as 'right-brain' functioning. In exchange, the 'left-brain' capacities are increased to undreamed potentials. The tendency of Biologicals to cling instead to their individual personalities can only be attributed to archaic evolutionary tendancies.
-Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, "Convergence"
And here we tinker with metal, to try to give it a kind of life, and suffer those who would scoff at our efforts. But who's to say that, if intelligence had evolved in some other form in past millennia, the ancestors of these beings would not now scoff at the idea of intelligence residing within meat?
-Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, "The Fallacies of Self-Awareness"
Of all the employments, working in the the brood pit was at once the most horrific and the most desirable. Horrific for what we saw occur day after day, and because of the very nature of the sessile native lifeforms. Desirable, because having being chosen to work in the pit, you were highly unlikely to be one of its victims.
-Captain Ulrik Svensgaard "The Shadow Resonance"
To understand a thing is to know the manner by which it might be destroyed.
A fundamental understanding of the basic building-blocks of the Universe is essential, then, to the total destruction of everything.
-Foreman Domai, "One Tool, One Thought"
War is war; destruction is destruction. You think this is obvious. But war is not destruction, it is victory.
To achieve victory, simply appear to give your opponent what he wants and he will go away, or join you in your quest for additional power.
-Datatech Sinder Roze, "Information Burns"
By creating a planetary network, mankind on Planet now has the ability to share information at light-speed. But by creating a single such network, each faction has brought themselves closer to discovery as well. At the speed of light, we will catch your information, tag it like an animal in the wild, and release it unharmed -- if such should serve our purposes.
-Datatech Sinder Roze, "The Alpha Codex"
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?
-Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467. (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
It is not uncommon to see patients undergo permanent psychological trauma in the presence of the Sphere, before the nerve stapler has even been strapped into position. Its effect on the general consciousness of the culture is profound: husbands have seen wives go inside, and mothers their children. Dr. Xynan left the surface of the sphere semitranslucent for a reason. You can hear them in there; you can see them. It is a thing of terrible beauty.
-Baron Klim, "The Music of the Spheres"
I swear sometimes they're watching me.
-Bozon Pete, Shift Foremant, Metagenics Biomachinery Division
I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put me in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breath, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment.
-Anonymous, Datalinks
Author
Topic: Quotes for Character Inspiration and Development (Read 604 times)