"He shut up, realizing that grim old Mother Nature, red of tooth and claw, invariably punished damfools who tried to ignore Her or to repeal Her ordinances; he need not interfere."

"Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either."

"All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying."

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

"Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy."

"I'll find a tutor — no, Laz, not a horizontal one. Don’t you ever think about anything else? (Come to think of it, dear, what else is worth thinking about? Money?)"

"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.”"

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"Lazarus expressed a rhetorical and physiologically improbable wish."

"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."

"Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth — but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three."

"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."

"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."

"“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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"He saw that he had committed the prime sin against survival: He had indulged in wishful thinking."

"They did ask, sometimes, and accepted my decision without argument. But I could see that they did not always believe me. That pleased me; they were starting to think for themselves — didn’t matter if they were wrong."

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

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."

"The best thing about the future was that it was unknown. Cassandra’s one good quality was that she was never believed."

"Anything worth doing is worth overdoing."

"Not everything needs to have a happily ever after and it fits (for me) that Allegiant doesn’t."

"[P]erhaps, taking a cue from Dauntless, Veronica Roth’s intent was to be brave in how she ended the story."

"There’s no way to please everyone, because that mythical book with the ending that every single person wants can’t exist—you want different things, each one of you. The only thing I can do, in light of that fact, is write an honest story as best I can."

"I thought about reaching out with my authorial hand and snatching her from that awful situation. I thought about it and I agonized over it. But to me, that felt dishonest and emotionally manipulative. This was the end she had chosen, and I felt she had earned an ending that was as powerful as she was."

"People talk about the pain of grief, but I don't know what they mean. To me, grief is a devastating numbness, every sensation dulled."

"I keep finding myself stifled by the company of others and then crippled by loneliness when I leave them. I am terrified and I don't even know of what, because I have lost everything already."

"There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now."

"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."

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

"Can I be forgiven for all I've done to get here? I want to be. I can. I believe it."