Altered Carbon Quotes

“Progress is difficult to define, your honor. As Quell would have it, they come to me with progress reports, but all I see is change, and bodies burnt.”

“When they ask how I died, tell them: still angry.”

“And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal.”

“Do you know that it cost us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run a virtual equivalent format? Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.”

“If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first.”

“I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practice birth control, for Christ’s sake.”

“If they want you, sooner or later they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artefact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they’ll come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they’ll be there waiting for you, clone-new, when you re-sleeve.”

“And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate.”

“Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people? You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them to or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. ”

“How shall I explain the dying that was done? Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote The value of his days Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?”

“Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.”

“Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.”

“So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin.”

“… like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.”

“You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don’t really matter anymore. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to fell you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you.”

“The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”

“Power is habitually buried. Think of the Protectorate bunkers on Harlan’s World. Or the Caverns the Envoy Corps hid you in while you were made over in their image. The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?”

“You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ’cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”

“If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous.”

“I believe anyone with a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one.”

“They will want to know How was the audit done? And I shall say that it was done, For once, By those who knew the worth Of what was spent that day.”