"He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound."

"Economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics."

"Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend."

"The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended."

"The words still don't move." "The words don't need to move. It is you who is moved by them."

"The laws of economics are subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our knowledge of the universe."

"His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather."

"Any aeai [A.I., artificial intelligence ] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it."

"I've always found that the root of a computer problem is human frailty"

"Half your DNA's owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright."

"How proud he would have felt [...] to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophecies from the barrel of an AK47."

"Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories."

"A chilly piety leaked into the air."

"Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress."

"The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime."

"She had trapped the bird of salvation, sung to it, tamed it and wrung its neck."

"Once muddying subjectivities are removed from the issue, the decision becomes clear."

"She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials."

"This is now a matter of national security, sir." "This is Franz Kafka, is what it is." Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down. "He's a Czech writer," Thomas Lull says. "He's been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony." "Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue."

"“Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?"

"That old saw about a problem shared being a problem halved? Damnable lie. A problem shared is a problem doubled."

"These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday."

"The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage."

"Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair."

"I do not trust the memory. Imaginings too easily become memories, memories imaginings."

"It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather."

"She knew what she was now. She had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility, for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of liberties within herself."

"It is an easy, and terrible, mistake to make, to think your will is God’s will."

"The elephants fight but the rats go about their business."

"He has no belief—faith is beneath his dignity—but he enjoys the designed madness of religion."

"It's like a pylon. 144px|thumb|right|It's like a pylon."

"If that was on my road the council would be like "Get that down, its a deathtrap!""

"Ricky: You are the strangest man alive."

"I've never understood what pole dancing's about anyway. It's a waste of a good skill. Get into scaffolding or something."

"If there's one thing we haven't cracked yet in human civilsation, we've never been able to make a good wig. I wouldn't want a wig on me."

"I don't cry. Water doesn't leave my head. I've got loads of gob. That's how water leaves me, it's not out of my eyes."

"12 hours on a plane, over 5,000 miles. All this way you've got me licking fish."

"I've got a fat head. There's nothing I can do about it."

"My brain's just full of passwords"

"If you had 5 photos of anuses, I could not point mine out"

"I'm really happy, I just don't choose to show it."

"This isn't Amazon where you can go "I'm not happy with the product" and pop it back in the post. Thats it, you've got it"

"Neil Armstrong, that spaceman, he went to the moon but he ain't been back. It can't have been that good."

"Whats good with a holiday right.. say if you work in a factory from 8 in the morning till 8 at night, packin socks into a rubber bag right.. between 8 and.. what time did i say he finishes?"

"It was good to know that if everything did go tits up, there's someone else in the world who would put up with me"

"People say having kids is life changing, well that doesn't necessarily mean a good thing, does it? I could take one of my legs off. That would change my life."

"Just pop it on your wrist. - Ricky asks Karl how his 'invention' of a watch that counts down your life would actually work."

"We've invented most of the stuff that we need and now we're just messing about"

"It's not going to change the world. But neither did the egg-cup."