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The casino level of Eros was an all-out assault on the senses. Holden hated it. “I love this place,” Amos said, grinning.

— Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

“My proselytizing days are long behind me.” “I didn’t think those ever ended,” Miller said. “They don’t. Not officially. But after a few decades, you come to a place where you realize that there’s really no difference between trying and not trying. I still travel. I still talk to people. Sometimes we talk about Jesus Christ. Sometimes we talk about cooking. If someone is ready to accept Christ, it doesn’t take much effort on my part to help them. If they aren’t, no amount of hectoring them does any good. So why try?”

— Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

You want to cry? Do it with all of us. We’ll sit together in the galley and get drunk and cry like babies, but we’ll do it together where it’s safe. No more hiding down here.” Shed nodded. “Can we do that?” he said. “Do what?” Holden asked. “Get drunk and cry like babies?” “Hell yes. That is officially on the schedule for tonight. Report to the galley at twenty hundred hours, Mr. Garvey. Bring a cup.”

— Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

Nothing in space ever actually stopped; it only came into a matching orbit with some other object.

— Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage …. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl …. Yet the GNP does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or … the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials …. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

Many early economists understood perfectly well that the wealth traded by and generated by capitalists really represented control over compressed sunlight, over energy flows through the biosphere. That is why so many subscribed to a labor theory of value; labor, after all, was energy.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

By two thousand years ago, humans were using seventy times the amount of energy they consumed at the end of the last ice age. This colossal energy bonanza from farming paid for population growth, for entropy’s various complexity taxes, and finally for the wealth of the rich and powerful. There is little sign that it improved the lives of most humans.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

Just as living organisms maintain electrochemical gradients that drive flows of energy, states maintain gradients of persuasion and coercion. They use law, education, and religion to persuade their subjects that their power is just. But they also maintain armies and disciplined groups of coercers so they can compel obedience when persuasion fails.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

Thinking about such processes in ecological terms reminds us that wealth never really consists of things; it consists of control over the energy flows that make, move, mine, and transform things. Wealth is a sort of compressed sunlight, just as matter is really congealed energy. Mobilizing this compressed energy from the rest of the population, along with the flows of resources that it made possible, became the fundamental task for rulers and governments, and that task would shape all aspects of the evolution and history of agrarian civilizations.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

In the year 2000, the total biomass of all wild land mammals was about one-twenty-fourth that of domesticated land mammals.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

There are species of sea slugs that have mini-brains when they are young. They use them as they voyage through the seas looking for a perch from which they can sieve food. But once they’ve found their perch, they no longer need such an expensive piece of equipment so … they eat their brains.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

the sequence TTA says, Add on a molecule of the amino acid leucine, while TAG is a sort of punctuation mark that says, Okay, you can stop copying now.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

the Murchison meteorite, which fell to Earth near Murchison, Australia, in 1969, contained amino acids and several of the chemical bases that we find in DNA.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian