"Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted ‘communications industry’ had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other."

"Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours."

"They’ve heard about space but they still don’t believe in it. They haven’t been out here to see for themselves that there isn’t any giant elephant under the earth, holding it up, and a giant tortoise holding up the elephant. If I say “planet” and “spaceship” to them, they still think “horoscope” and “flying saucer”."

"There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky."

"It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens."

"I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!"

"To Space-Age man, every mystery is a greed-magnet."

"“How like humans,” he said drily. “The universe is vast, majestic, intricate, patterned with inexhaustible beauty, vivid with infinitely varied life—and there’s only one thing in it that really interests you. The same thing that makes you buy books, build families, create atomic theories (I imagine) or, once upon a time, write poetry. Sex.”"

"Their feeble attempts to appear concerned only made them look to him more like two fat cats full of stolen cream and with a map of the secret tunnel leading to the meat locker tucked inside their fur vests."

""Excuse me, Gaspard,” Flaxman interjected, “but would you mind turning the emotional down and the factual up?”"

"Humans aren’t as you idealized them, Blanda. Humans are dream-killers. They took the bubbles out of soapsuds, Blanda, and called it detergent. They took the moonlight out of romance and called it sex."

"For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone?"

"Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past’s mistakes and the future’s fears."

"Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself."

"Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time."

"Sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn’t once entirely different from anything we remember, and we’ve forgotten that we forgot."

"In the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it’s true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless accidents."

"Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards."

"It’s this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos — and don’t tell me that isn’t in the cards! — masquerading as benign omniscient authority."

"I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten."

"What have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!"

"They sat in small parties with a truculent quietness that sneered at and challenged the frantic hustle of the times and the belief that the hustle was leading anywhere."

"For a full century now Americans have been living in one of those ages of collective madness and herd delusion, comparable only to the Dutch tulip mania, the witchcraft dread, the dancing madness, Trotskyism, and the Crusades. Until 1950 ours might have been called the Automobile Mania, but now the imagination can only grope for a name—I’m writing an unpopular book on the subject, you see. Not that this current social madness is a deep secret or anything to be startled at. What other results could have been expected when American society began to overvalue on the one hand security, censorship, an imagined world-saving idealism and self-sacrifice in war, and on the other hand insatiable hunger for possessions, fiercely competitive aggressiveness, sadistic male belligerence, contempt for parents and the state, and a fantastically overstimulated sexuality?"

"The only thing robots couldn’t do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition."

"Hey, am I dreaming?...Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line? The second question, though not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for paranoia!"

"He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest With the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood."

"Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse."

"What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?"

"Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all."

"A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences."

"What is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb."

"Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class."

"After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. It all depends on the evidence. The evidence decides everything."

"“Conscience is only social pressure,” he told her, tense without quite knowing why, “the impulse to submerge your ego in that of the herd, and do what other people want you to because you’re afraid of their censure. Realistic self-interest frees a person from the childish restrictions of conscience.” “Are you sure of that, Jarles? What about your dreams? Conscience may be partly what you say it is, but it’s more than that. It’s hearkening to the wisest thoughts that have occurred to the minds of the human race.”"

"“Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. “They are unreal.” “They’re as real as anything else,” she shot back at him. “And they merely mean conscience.”"

"I suppose that every blundering idealist who hasn’t been brought face to face with the hard facts of life carries, at the back of his mind, a sneaking suspicion that villainy is a very dashing and romantic thing. When your mind turned turtle, or when they turned it for you, your new personality was necessarily fabricated out of all your fragmentary romantic notions of villainy—unlimited ambition and conceit, absolute lack of emotion, and all the rest of the supervillain ideology!"

"The idea of brutality actually shocks him, thought Goniface amusedly. I wonder what name he has for the toil we exact of the commoners, and the penances we impose on them?"

"He knew that ahead lay many perils—threats to his bodily welfare. And recently Jarles had come to have a great respect for that bag of flesh and bones which contained his ego."

"What is idealism? It is distortion. A giving of false values to things which in reality do not possess those values. Personalities differ chiefly in their pattern of values. When the values are largely false, the personality is unstable."

"“Armon Jarles, there is only the cosmos and the electronic entities that constitute it, without soul or purpose, save so far as neuronic minds impose purpose upon it. “Armon Jarles, the Hierarchy embodies the highest form of such purpose. “Armon Jarles, the supernatural and the idealized have one trait in common. They are not. There is only reality.”"

"No matter how hard and wearisome an age this might be, it was certainly a very exciting one with regard to manifestations of the supernatural."

"But now the priests think only one thing. How to hold on to their power as long as mankind lasts—until the sun darkens and the earth freezes!"

"“You have been told that the Great God rules the universe—earth and sky. I tell you the Great God is fake!”"

"Yes, indeed, he assured himself rapidly, things did seem to be working around to a grand payoff in the great game of trading heroic feats for intimate maidenly favors that all heroes lived or at least hoped by, no matter how disordered and irregular the bookkeeping."

"Great conquerors live on as their enemies’ devils."

"Old legends said Death had a skinny sister denominated Pain, passionately devoted to the loathsome torture that often was Death’s prelude."

"“Legends travel on rainbow wings and sport gaudy colors,” the harbormaster answered him, “while truth plods on in sober garb.”"

"And the mighty are great worriers and spend much time preventing anything that troubles their peace of mind."

"Women have power over men almost as great as gods do."