I’m not much of a video gamer. I’m stuck in a (virtuous) cycle of compounding disinterest: I don’t play many games, so I never gain the proficiency or patience to become a good gamer, which makes it harder to enjoy video games, which further discourages me from gaming, and so on. That’s not to say I don’t have my vices. I’m caught in my own peculiar cycle of consumption: reading longform and Wikipedia articles, which encourages me to read even more “for understanding and context”, which takes me to more articles; and the next thing I know, it’s the end of another glorious but wholly unproductive day.

I guess it makes sense, then, that the only video games I currently play are those that scratch some obscure intellectual itch. For the last six months, those have been Kerbal Space Program and Civilization V. I will surely write about my experiences with Kerbal in the future, but for now, I’d like to share one of my favorite little features of Civ5: the Technology and Wonder quotes.

These quotes appear in in-game cinematic screens that are triggered when the player completes research of a new Technology or construction of a Wonder, thereby unlocking new units or buildings for the player to use. In Civ5, they’re voiced by W. Morgan Sheppard, a British actor with a fantastic voice; in Civ4, they’re voiced by the great Leonard Nimoy. You can listen to all of them compiled for Civ5 and Civ4.

These quotes serve no in-game purpose except to lend the game some gravitas and humor. It certainly worked. I absolutely love the thought the developers put into this minor detail of the game. And to a guy whose undergraduate degree is listed as “Science, Technology, and International Relations”, this list is basically pure gold. While most of the quotes straightforwardly relate to the technology or its inventor (e.g. Isaac Newton, for Physics; “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”), others are clever, fitting, witty, or mellifluously poetic.

Here’s a compilation of my favorites (including ones from Civ4): 1

• Acoustics: “Their rising all at once was as the sound of a thunder heard remote.” – John Milton, Paradise Lost
• Advanced Ballistics: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?” – Tom Lehrer, parodying Wernher von Braun
• Advanced Ballistics (second version): “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Advanced Flight (Civ4): “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth – Put out my hand and touched the Face of God.” – John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
• Artillery (Civ4): “Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.” – Frederick the Great
• Assembly Line (Civ4): “People can have the Model T in any color – so long as it’s black.” – Henry Ford
• Astronomy (Civ4): “Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.” – Plato
• Banking: “Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Big Ben (Wonder): “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.” – Leonard Bernstein
• Biology: “If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.”
  – Lyall Watson
• Brandenburg Gate (Wonder): “Pale Death beats equally at the poor man’s gate and at the palaces of kings.” – Horace
• Buildings: “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
• Civil Service: “The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.” – Eugene McCarthy
• Civil Service (Civ4): “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” – Oscar Wilde
• Classical Era: “He who knows others is wise; He who know himself is enlightened.” – Lao Tzu
• CN Tower (Wonder): “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” – Douglas Adams
• Combustion (Civ4): “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.” – E.B. White
• Communism (Civ4): “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” – Archbishop Helder Camara
• Compass: “I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Compass (Civ4): “The wisest men follow their own direction.” – Euripides
• Computers: “Computers are like Old Testament gods: lots of rules and no mercy.” – Joseph Campbell
• Computers (Civ4): “Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.” – Steve Wozniak
• Corporation (Civ4): “Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” – Ambrose Bierce
• Dynamite: “As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.” – Christopher Dawson
• Drama and Poetry: “What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.” – Alfred Hitchcock
• Economics: “Q: What is the most powerful force in the Universe? A: Compound interest.” – Albert Einstein
• Eiffel Tower (Wonder): “We only live to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” – Kahlil Gibran
• Electricity (Civ4): “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.” – Thomas Edison
• Engineering (Civ4): “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Flight: “Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.” – Igor Sikorsky
• Flight (Civ4): “For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.” – Leonardo da Vinci
• Future Era: “The future is not what it used to be.” – Yogi Berra
• Future Tech: “I think we all agree, the past is over.” – George W. Bush
• Future Tech (Civ4): “The future will be better tomorrow.” – Dan Quayle
• Game Concepts (Civ5 Game Glossary): “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” – Albert Camus
• Guilds (Civ4): “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” – Adam Smith
• Gunpowder (Civ4): “You can get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.” – Al Capone
• Himeji Castle (Wonder): “Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning.” – Yamamoto Tsunetomo
• Industrial Era: “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” – Mark Twain
• The Kremlin (Wonder): “The Law is a fortress on a hill that armies cannot take or floods wash away.” – The Prophet Muhammad
• Literature (Civ4): “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested.” – Sir Francis Bacon
• Masonry (Civ4): “It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls.” – Aristophanes
• Mass Media (Civ4): “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” – Oscar Wilde
• Medieval Era: “An emperor is subject to no one but God and justice.” – Fredrick I, Barbarossa
• Military Science: “Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.” – George S. Patton
• Military Science (Civ4): “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” – John Adams
• Mining: “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but NOT its mineral rights.” – J. Paul Getty
• Mobile Tactics: “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” – Sun Tzu
• Modern Era: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” – Josef Stalin
• Navigation: “The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” – Edward Gibbon
• Nuclear Fusion: “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.” – Albert Einstein
• Penicillin: “In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.” – Cicero
• The Pentagon (Wonder): “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Philosophy (Civ4): “I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.” – Aristotle
• Piracy: “The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do, and what a man can’t do. I can let you drown, but I can’t sail this ship to Tortuga all by me onesies, savvy? So, can you sail under the command of a pirate, or can you not?” – Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean
• Plastics: “Ben, I want to say one word to you, just one word: plastics.” – Mr. McGuire, The Graduate
• Pottery: “Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, what makest thou?” – The Bible, Isaiah 45:9
• Pottery (Civ4): “Hath not the potter power over the clay, to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?” – The Bible, Romans 9:21
• Printing Press: “It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.” – Wilbur F. Storey (aptronym!), The Chicago Times
• Rifling: “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” – Robert E. Lee
• Robotics (Civ4): “The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.” – B.F. Skinner
• Rocketry (Civ4): “The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot eternally live in a cradle.” – Konstatin E. Tsiolkovsky
• Sistine Chapel (Wonder): “I live and love in God’s peculiar light.” – Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Specialists and Great People (Civ5 Game Glossary): “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
• Steam Power (Civ4): “You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I have no time for such nonsense.” – Napoleon, on Robert Fulton’s steamship
• Superconductors (Civ4): “What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
• Sydney Opera House (Wonder): “Those who lose dreaming are lost.” – Australian Aboriginal saying
• Taj Mahal (Wonder): “The Taj Mahal rises above the banks of the river like a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time.” – Rabindranath Tagore
• Telecommunications: “The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.” – J.B. Priestly
• Telegraph: “I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying ‘flee at once – all is discovered.’ They all left town immediately.” – Mark Twain (also attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle)
• Wonders (Civ5 Game Glossary): “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none more wonderful than man.” – Sophocles
• Writing (Civ4): “True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.” – Pliny the Elder