"Surely you’ll at least see the Temple? Respect all religions, is my motto, believe in none. Sensible principle. Still, you know, must say, after all, two thousand beautiful priestesses! All ready, willing, able—and I must say—dextrous!— to do their best to inspire male worshippers with love for their goddess, hah-hah!"

"“Drew a knife on us,” one muttered, with the sullen rage of the bully who feels wronged when resisted."

"A querulous whine that was almost a question was succeeded by a deep gobble that was almost an answer."

"Hmm...hmm. A stag hunt. To what elaborate lengths the equestrian classes go in order to draw out the simple business of butchering venison."

"Rumor, I fear, is scarcely as accurate as he is rapid."

"Everything meant something, still, some meanings were revealed sooner than others. And that some were seemingly never revealed in no way disproved the fact."

"I can tell you that only a fool destroys useful things merely because he doesn’t like them."

"“Follow me, men! I’m right behind you!”"

"No greed was comparable to the appeal of self-sacrifice."

"The short man was all of a piece, but there was nothing reassuring in this; it was a piece of the same material that too many high school principals, boys’ camp directors, and military and naval officers are made of: a texture or quality often dignified by the description, “ability to command”—the desire to bully, override, bear down—the capacity to do so by virtue of office—the habit of having done so for a long time and the confidence of continuing to do so for a long time."

"He who has slain one, will he abstain from slaying many?"

"“The fact that you know the questions,” he said, a mite grudgingly, “tends to make me think you might really know the answers.”"

"“Don’t you see?” They did not see. This is the way things were done. Things were done this way. Things weren’t done another way. You did things the way you did things. You didn’t do things the way you didn’t do things."

"Experience may be a bitter teacher, but She is a good one."

"“How is your new woman? Your new-est one, I sh’d say.” Jack shrugged. “Good enough. They all got the same thing.” “Yeh-es,” Jeff nodded, judiciously. “But some of ’m’s got more of it than others.”"

"The instructor-Na has observed in the Na 14 tendencies toward an archaic and dangerous quality to which the ancients gave the name personal ambition."

"There was an inn...which kept no register of...a number of seamstresses and tailors who lacked time and place and perhaps inclination to weave the cloths they cut and sewed, depending instead on the activities of those who preferred not to vex the original owners with the tiresome bookkeeping inseparable from purchase."

"Tell him you’ll pay any fine within reason. That dragon-cod can’t even read his own name unless it’s written in gold ink."

"The beast is always doomed. It’s better to face the fact honestly and not pretty it up with a lot of lies about blowing off steam and reducing tensions and getting rid of this and that, acting out anxieties, moment of truth. Piddle. There’s an ancient word, I don’t know what language it is. Bazazz. All those arguments are a lot of bazazz. Unless you’re wiping out vermin or hunting for meat to eat, the man who kills animals does so because he likes to kill. And people who like to watch do so because they like to see things being killed."

"Life continued, the wheel turned, the earth moved, and even death—that delightful biological necessity—was an aspect of life."

"Recall the instructor at the Academy: “What is Man, young aspirants? Man is an animal that trades…”"

"It is not a very interesting night market, anyway. No wonderful things are sold there, though often one wonders, next day, how one could have bought them..."

"Well, rather an ague than a pox. A pox is something one wishes on editors…strange breed, editors. The females all have names like Lulu Ammabelle Smith or Minnie Lundquist Bloom, and the males have little horns growing out of their brows."

"When the records of our civilization are balanced, then—but perhaps not before—the real importance of dental science will be appreciated. Now it is merely valued at the moment of toothache."

"In general I find little girls enchanting. What a shame they grow up to be big girls and make our lives as miserable as we allow them, and oft-times more."

"Bloodgood Bixbee knew nothing about art, but he knew what he didn’t like."

"“A conscientious and diligent scientist—” “—must remain a continual student,” a deep voice finished the quotation."

"Things were seldom what they seemed. People feared to tempt powers spiritual or temporal or illegal by displays of well being, and the brick screens in from of (or behind, depending on whether one were going in or going out) the doors blocked both the gaze of the curious and the path of demons. Demons can travel only in straight lines; it is the sons of men whose ways are devious."

"Clearly this was no time to ask if they should first define their terms. Nor, for that matter, had Socrates had to define the bowl of hemlock."

"Things oughtn’t to be the way they are, altogether. But letting a madman burn down the barn is no way to improve them."

"It had not been precisely a fruitful meeting, but it had been a long one."

"Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant."

"It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution."

"Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years."

"At some point it will inevitably crash again: as weapons of mass destruction go, unrestricted market economies are among the more subtle but sure."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."