(3089/898) In fingo veritas

58) There is a straight ladder from the atom to the grain of sand, and the only real mystery in physics is the missing rung. Below it, particle physics; above it, classical physics; but in between, metaphysics. All the mystery in life turns out to be this same mystery, the join between things which are distinct and yet continous, body and mind, free will and fate, living cells and life itself; the free moment before the foetus.

Tom Stoppard
Hapgood (play, 1988)
spoken by the character "Kerner",
an emigre Russian physicist and double agent

59) "It's a question of where to draw the line," he said. "Lines have to be drawn; even I realize that. But the line is constantly moving. In a progressive society, the line should be moving. Do you know it was once illegal to terminate a pregnancy? [...] They'd decided that a fetus was human. Later, we changed our minds. Society used to keep dead people hooked up to something called 'life support,' sometimes for twenty or thirty years. You couldn't turn the machines off [...] They were dead [...] by our standards. Corpses with blood being pumped through them. Bizarre, creepy as hell. You wonder what they were thinking of, what their reasoning could possibly have been. When people knew they were dying, when they knew that death was going to be horribly painful, it was thought wrong of them to kill themselves [...] A doctor couldn't help them die; he'd get prosecuted for murder. Sometimes they even withheld the drugs that would be best at stopping the pain. Any drug that dulled the senses, or heightened them, or altered consciousness in any way was viewed as sinful - except for the two most physically harmful drugs: alcohol and nicotine. Something relatively harmless, like heroin, was completely illegal, because it was addictive, as if alcohol was not. No one had the right to determine what he put into his own body, they had no medical bill of rights [...] I've studied their rationalizations. They make little sense now."

John Varley
Steel Beach (1992)

60) Around them, men in white went about their business with the insect-intensity of technicians everywhere.

Dan Simmons
Phases of Gravity (1989)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 881 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.