"She was beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Event would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now."

"Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day—each so full, and oh so lovely—and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them."

"The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History."

"Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm."

"Dominance hierarchies had underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time democratic values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every primate’s sense of self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be imposed, by force."

"It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds."

"Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable."

"To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses."

"Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it."

"Thinking it over, Sax said,”Do you ever worry that work on a realm so far beyond the reach of experiment will turn out to be a kind of house of cards—knocked over by some simple discrepancy in the math, or some later different theory that does the job better, or is more confirmable?” “No,” Bao said. “Something so beautiful as this has to be true.”"

"Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make do."

"A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived?"

"Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?"

"No one could complain about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing nostalgia for a heroic age that had not actually been heroic—or, along with heroic, had also been suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No, Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia—the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in resistance but in expression."

"“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped governments from doing what they wanted to do?”"

"Tourism is an ugly business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting parasites."

"Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself."

"You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law."

"After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up."

"“Please don’t ask stupid questions,” he said. “Sunnis are fighting Shiites—Lebanon is devastated—the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states—the North African countries are a metanat—Syria and Iraq hate each other—Iraq and Egypt hate each other—we all hate the Iranians, except for the Shiites—and we all hate Israel, of course, and the Palestinians too—and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouins from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?"

"People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture—that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it."

"“It’s kind of scary,” Art remarked to Nadia. “Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.” “Always.”"

"They’re lucky they can’t read each other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each other—they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad."

"Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before."

"But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science."

"Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique."

"Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining."

"Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics."

"“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him. “Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere."

"It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power."

"Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy."

"Michael was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around."

"He made a face. “Arguments, speculation—conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”"

"“We could have a contest. Who does Jackie listen to least?” Maya laughed out loud. “Everyone would win.”"

"Every generation is its own secret society."

"Conspiracy theory was tremendously popular, always and forever. People wanted such catastrophes to mean something more than mere individual madness, and so the hunt was on."

"If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change."

"You conceive of science as nothing more than answers to questions? As a system for generating answers. And what is the purpose of that? ...To know. And what will you do with your knowledge? ...Find out more. But why? I don’t know. It’s the way I am."

"Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality."

"Anyone can agree that things should be fair, and the world just. The way to get there is always the real problem."

"When she realized what she was doing she snorted in disgust, at herself and at the pervasiveness of politics—how it could infect everything if you let it."

"Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them."

"In the next meeting they were arguing about the limits to tolerance, the things that simply wouldn’t be allowed no matter what religious meaning anyone gave them, and someone shouted, “Tell that to the Muslims!”"

"We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need."

"Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point by point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their slaves."

"Revolution has to be rethought. Look, even when revolutions have been successful, they have caused so much destruction and hatred that there is always some kind of horrible backlash. It’s inherent in the method. If you choose violence, then you create enemies who will resist you forever. And ruthless men become your revolutionary leaders, so when the war is over they’re in power, and likely to be as bad as what they replaced."

"“Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on. “Art is an idiot,” Maya replied."

"What we need is equality without conformity."