A quote from "Immortality"

I stumbled on this one the other day, and thought how it echoed p.d. diablo's sentiment on the homepage. Far more expansive, though.

"To load a program into the computer: this does not mean that the future has been planned down to the last detail, that everything is written 'up above.' For example, the program did not specify that in 1815 a battle would be fought near Waterloo and that the French would be defeated, but only that man is aggressive by nature, that he is condemned to wage war, and that technical progress would make war more and more terrible. Everything else is without importance, from the Creator's point of view, and is only a play of permutations and combinations within a general program, which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision has been left to chance."

-Milan Kundera
Immortality