"Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter. Women know this instinctively; that’s why they are all smugglers. Men often believe — or pretend — that the “Law” is something sacred, or at least a science — an unfounded assumption very convenient to governments."

"Every so often some idiot tries to abolish marriage. Such attempts work as well as repealing the law of gravity, making pi equal to three point zero, or moving mountains by prayer."

"In the first place, very little thinking was ever done in English; it is not a language suited to logical thought. Instead, it’s an emotive lingo beautifully adapted to concealing fallacies. A rationalizing language, not a rational one."

"‘Put not your faith in princes,’ Ira; since they don’t produce, they always steal."

"“I'm still learning English. By the naturalistic method the way a child learns his milk language. No grammar, no syntax, no dictionary — just listen and talk and read it. Acquire new words by context. By that method I acquired a feeling that ‘love' means the shared ecstasy that can be attained through sex. Is that right?” “Son, I hate to say this — because, if you've been reading a lot of English, I see how you reached that opinion — but you are one hundred percent wrong.”"

"If there is a purpose in life more important than two people cooperating in making a baby, all the philosophers in history haven’t been able to find it."

"Whores perform the same function as priests, Ira, but far more thoroughly."

"Latin is majestic, especially when you don’t understand it."

"Don’t ask me why. It was Navy policy and therefore did not have a reason."

"But David, like all true geniuses, paid only pragmatic attention to rules made by other people — he obeyed the Eleventh Commandment and never got caught."

"A capsule description of most human “progress”: By the time you learn how, it’s too late."

"He enjoyed it, for every hour in school was an hour sitting down doing nothing harder than reading. Before and after school he had to do chores on his family’s farm, which he hated, as they were what was known as “honest work” — meaning hard, dirty, inefficient, and ill-paid — and also involved getting up early, which he hated even worse."

"Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

"Do not ask why; it was no more subject to rational explanation than is any other branch of theology."

"May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live."

"Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil."

"Lazarus expressed a rhetorical and physiologically improbable wish."

"Whoring is like military service, Ira — okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down."

"The purpose of my government is never to do good, but simply to refrain from doing evil."

"Half the battle with any culture is knowing its taboos."

"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn — when they do, which isn't often — on their own, the hard way."

"There’s no virtue in being old, it just takes a long time."

"Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit. Its only advantage, so far as I have been able to see, is that it spans change. A young person sees the world as a still picture, immutable. An old person has had his nose rubbed in changes and more changes and still more changes so many times that he knows it is a moving picture, forever changing. He may not like it — probably doesn’t; I don’t — but he knows it’s so, and knowing it is the first step in coping with it."

"I learned centuries back that there is no privacy in any society crowded enough to need IDs. A law guaranteeing privacy simply insures that bugs — microphones and lenses and so forth — are that much harder to spot."

"Security people always spy on their bosses; they can’t help it, it’s a syndrome that goes with the job."

"“Then you believe in an afterlife?” “Slow up! I don’t ‘believe’ in anything. I know certain things — little things, not the Nine Billion Names of God — from experience. But I have no beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning."

"History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion — i.e., none to speak of."

"Oh, I have strong opinions, but a thousand reasoned opinions are never equal to one case of diving in and finding out. Galileo proved that and it may be the only certainty we have."

"I spent my boyhood the way every boy does — trying to keep my elders from finding out what I was up to."

"“Common sense?” “Son, that phrase is self-contradictory. ‘Sense’ is never ‘common.’”"

"Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig."

"The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history."

"I know what my mother is—she is someone for whom the end of a thing justifies the means of getting there, the same as my father, and the same, sometimes, as me."

"Why do you care? I ask myself. He betrayed you. He didn't try to stop your execution. I don't care. I do care. I don't know."

"I squeeze her shoulder with one hand and run my other hand over her hair, still surprised when her hair stops above her neck instead of below it. I was happy when she cut it, because it was hair for a warrior and not a girl, and I knew that was what she would need."

"This isn't about what would they would want, Tris."

"I thought that when I received Christina's forgiveness, the hard part of Will's death would be over. But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done."

"It's strange how time can make a place shrink, make its strangeness ordinary."

"My mother wasn't a fool," I say. "She just understood something you didn't. That it's not sacrifice it it's someone else's life you're giving away, it's just evil." I take another step and say, "She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love, not misplaced disgust for another person's genetics. That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be one for people who need your strength because they don't have enough of their own."

""Can we do it please? I would like to avoid having to break you out of prison," I say. Suddenly desperate for comfort, I reach for Tris's hand, and she brings her fingers up to meet mine. We are not people who touch each other carelessly; every point of contact between us feels important, a rush of energy and relief."

"My toes are cold. My feet stick to the tiles. We turn a corner, and I hear muffled shouts. At first I can't tell what the voice is saying, but as we draw closer, it takes shape. "I want to…her!" Tobias. "I…see her!" I glance at Peter. "I can't speak to him on last time, can I?" Peter shakes his head. "There's a window, though. Maybe if he see's you he'll finally shut up." He takes me down a dead-end corridor that's only six feet long. At the end is a door, and Peter is right, there's a small window near the top, about a foot above my head. "Tris!" Tobias's voice is even clearer here. "I want to see her!" I reach up and press my hand to the glass. The shouts stop, and his face appears behind the glass. His eyes are red; his face, blotchy. Handsome. He stares at me for a few seconds and then presses his hand to the glass so it lines up with mine. I pretend I can feel the warmth of it through the window."

"I read somewhere, once, that crying defies scientific explanation. Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes. There is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion. I think we cry to release the animal parts of us without losing our humanity. Because inside me is a beast that snarls and growls, and strains toward freedom, toward Tobias, and above all, toward life. And as hard as I try, I cannot kill it. So I sob into my hands instead."

"I'm going to die tomorrow. It has been a long time since I felt certainty about anything, so this feels like a gift. Tonight, nothing. Tomorrow, whatever comes after life."

"I nod. Its sounds like a good plan—a smart plan. But I don't believe him—I don't believe it's more important to move forward that to find out the truth. When I found out that I was Divergent…when I found out that Erudite would attack Abnegation…those revelations changed everything. The truth has a way of changing a person's plans."

"One choice can destroy you"

"Tobias Eaton is a powerful name."

"You are not your parents. You are a sixteen-year-old girl—" I grit my teeth. "How dare you—" "—who doesn't understand the value of sacrifice lies in its necessity, not in throwing your life away! And if you do that again, you and I are done." I wasn't expecting him to say that. "You're giving me an ultimatum?" I try to keep my voice down so the others can't hear. He shakes his head. "No, I'm telling you a fact." His lips are just a line. "If you throw yourself into danger for no reason again, you will have become nothing more than a Dauntless adrenaline junkie looking for a hit, and I'm not going to help you do it." He spits the words out bitterly. "I love Tris the Divergent, who makes decisions apart from faction loyalty, who isn't some faction archetype. But the Tris who's trying as hard as she can to destroy believe you're still in there," he says against my mouth. "Come back."

"Breathing—who cares about breathing? I turn from the sight, listening to my heart beat in my ears. Christina's mouth moves. I ignore her, and walk to the door and down the stairs and down the hallway and into the elevator. The doors close and as I drop to the earth, just as Marlene did a"

"Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switched on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing. And then rising from within me is a single thought: I don't want to die."

"If this is the last message I send you… well, let's just say I hope you burn for this."