"“Most of the monotheisms were tribal, pastoral, retributive religions that committed holocausts and built pyramids of skulls and conducted organized murder for a few thousand years, so there were lots of opportunities for one guy’s god to fight some other guy’s god. Each tribal religion claimed that its god was the One True God. Every prophet had his own idea about what that meant, of course, and as a result man was always being jerked around between different people’s ideas of god, depending on who’d won the most recent war, or palace coup, or political battle. “This meant mankind was always being asked to accept deities foreign to his own nature. I mean, if your prophet was sexually insecure, or if his later interpreters were, that religion demanded celibacy or repression or even hatred of women; if the prophet was a homophobe, he preached persecution of homosexuals; and if he was both lecherous and greedy, he preached polygyny. If he was luxurious, he preached give-me-money-and-God-will-make-you-rich; if he felt put upon he preached God-of-Vengeance, let’s kill the other guy; and no matter how much well-meaning ecumenicists pretended all the gods were one god under different aspects, they weren’t any such thing, because every prophet created God in his own image, to confront his own nightmares.”"

"It is our minds and not any other attribute which gives us personhood and value. We share intelligence with other living things, and they are no less important than we. Even creatures without detectable intelligence have adapted themselves to play necessary roles. To make God in our image or we in God’s is blasphemy."

"There is no sin inherent in any mind save the sin of pride in believing one has seen or been taught the absolute truth. The second greatest sin is refusing to search for the truth one must acknowledge one will never absolutely find."

"Even when people are well-meaning, do not let them fool with your heads."

"They still begin their services with the first words the prophetess had spoken to them as a teaching. “This I say unto you, be not sexist pigs.”"

"Other such interpretations were used to order the dress of the High Baidee, which included such items as the zettle, a small scarf of precious material hung from the belt, on one side of which were embroidered the words “Stuff happens,” and on the other “Not guilty.”"

"Though he was very young, only in his early twenties, he had enormous charisma. This attribute alone made him believable in the way that actors and demagogues are believable: he was so overwhelmingly convincing he was never required to demonstrate relevance."

"Most boys moved when they started having love affairs—or thinking about having love affairs. Just thinking could go on for a considerable time without anything really happening, not like those marriage cultures, where all the women were trying to cling to their virginity and all the males were trying to take it away from them, everybody panting and rushing, trying to grab off acceptable partners under acceptable conditions before they got too old."

"The prophetess had declared it a sin to believe in absolute truths, but the Scrutators claimed that didn’t apply to religious truths, of which they had manufactured a good supply over the centuries."

"“How did you know we were Voorstoders?” he asked in a silken voice. “You said ‘Lord knows,’” the man replied. “Voorstoders say that. I do a bit of reading in the Archives, bit of a hobby with me. Like to read about those old religions. That Lord-this, Lord-that kind of talk belongs to the old tribal religions, doesn’t it?” Old and outworn, said his voice. Old and outworn and suspect."

"“It seems to me,” said Spiggy softly, “that when a race of man becomes so anthropocentric it regards other living beings as lesser consumables, it could get to be a habit. It might become easy to include other living creatures with the Gharm. Animals. Children. Women. Entire planet. Perhaps they, too, become consumables, to be used up and thrown away.”"

"The prophets trusted no one. Trust had no part in the Cause."

"“Coup markers?” Jep had asked Pirva. “The cause?” Pirva had not looked up from what she was doing. “The Cause is their society, their religion, their brotherhood,” she had said, the words dripping like acid from her mouth. “It’s a killers’ club. A man gets a coup counter for each Abolitionist or Gharm man, woman, or child he has killed out there in Ahabar or the Three Counties. There are special counters for bombs set off in the three counties, no matter who is killed or mutilated.”"

"Over time, a very nice system had developed by which persons actually interested in religion as religion (rather than religion as a system of social control, religion as politics, religion as warfare, or religion as spectacle) met over luncheon from time to time to read their scholarly research to one another, while clerks and aides got on with the endless and self-generating paperwork, or so it was still called, despite the fact there was little or no paper involved."

"“No army?” “No. They’ve always advocated terrorist tactics, not battle. Their biggest group is their Faithful, the brethren of the Cause led by that group of fanatics they call the prophets. If you ever want to meet a wild man, meet a prophet. But, in addition to the Cause, there are probably a hundred splinter groups, all of them devoted to terrorism of one kind or another, some of them with only half a dozen members. One nice thing about them, they’ve never been able to work together."

"These men are the kind who would kill their slaves and families rather than let us free them."

"You’ve got to understand they’re a puritan people, Commander. Sex is a very powerful taboo among Voorstoders. They delay it and forestall it when they can. The prophets of the Cause tell them sex is power, and being celibate stores up their power. The priests tell them married sex is all right, but only that. Both priests and prophets tell them not to look at women, not to think of women, that women are evil snares of the devil. And all women past puberty wear robes that cover all of them but their eyes."

"“It would be some young firebrands with more energy than sense, and they would do it because they would regard the religion in question as a kind of disease.” “Catching, is it?” “Seemingly so. Or, perhaps I should say, suspected to be so.” “That could be ugly. People turn fanatic, do they? Rant and rave against the unholy? Claim to have the only source of truth? Execute people for heresy? Burn people at the stake? Shovel them wholesale into ovens?” Rasiel was a student of human history, including its more barbaric periods."

"“Mostly it’s just that you’re not one of us. If you’re not one of us, you’re an unbeliever. Everyone not part of us is part of the devil: you, the people of Ahabar, the people of Phansure, everyone. Our Cause is to destroy the devil, all of it. We’re the only true followers of God. We have the truth. It was revealed to us, long ago, on Manhome.”… “You believe that, too?” “Of course I believe it. It is my Cause. It was my father’s Cause, and his father’s before him. Even on Manhome we killed the unbelievers.”"

"“Great work?” he asked. “The final victory of Almighty God,” said Phaed, with a grin. “In the book it is revealed that we shall put whole worlds to the sword.” Phaed dusted off a chair and sat down. “So say the prophets, and since they say it, so do I.”"

"“Why pretend now that you cared?” “Why not pretend whatever I like if it makes my life easier? We learned that, you see, we Faithful. We learn to say to ourselves whatever we need to say to make the task easy. We learn to say, ‘for God and Voorstod,’ when we blow up some old lady in the toilet or some schoolyard full of children. We wouldn’t necessarily do it for ourselves, you see, but we can do it for God and Voorstod.”"

"I hope my studies may be an encouragement to other women, especially to young women, to devote their lives to the larger interests of the mind. It matters little whether men or women have the more brains; all we women need to do to exert our proper influence is just to use all the brains we have."

"Suck it Down."

"John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch."

"It has to be well timed. It needs to have the right components that maybe contain emerging technologies or something like, say, when Doom came out -- the Network play -- there weren't many games like that. There was a really great 3D world that a lot of people hadn't seen. It was light-years ahead of Wolfenstein. It was shareware, so it had Internet distribution. We used the Internet to get it all over the place. So it used a lot of stuff that was just becoming popular at that time. id just capitalized on it."

"Design is Law"

"Doom 2 is just such a bigger, badder, better version of Doom"

"There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them."