"The Anarchists' uncompromising rejection of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its "absolutist" and "Utopian" character, makes much better sense in the present era than the Marxist relativist and historical approach. The pacifists also seem to be more realistic than the Marxist both in their understanding of modern war and also in their attempts to do something about it..."

"Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the discussion."

"Can one imagine that The Bomb could ever be used "in a good cause"? Do not such means instantly, of themselves, corrupt any cause? The bomb is the natural product of the kind of society we have created. It is as easy, normal, and unforced an expression of the American way of Life as electric ice-boxes,banana splits, and hydro-matic drive automobiles."

"I could have given him false consolation then, I suppose. I could have lied, and said that what he had seen was a fever dream, a fantasy, that Athilan would endure forever and a day. But I’m not much good at lying. And I knew that he wasn’t looking for lies from me, or consolations, or anything else that might make him feel good for a moment at the expense of the truth."

"There’s no use trying to kid myself with cheery little uplifting cliches. I’ve been forced right up against the underlying truth of things. What a dark and cruel place the world is, for all its beauty, for all its wonder! We have miracles around us on every side—a spiderweb is a miracle, Lora!—but we also have violence, insanity, terrible disease, sudden death. The same Nature that brings us the mountains and the rivers and the green glistening meadows brings us the hurricane, the earthquake, the flood of red-hot lava rolling toward the city."

"He named the names of gods. He named the names of kings—the secret names, the names they had worn as princes, before they became the newest Harinamur. He called upon all the forces of the universe to free himself from— Me."

"The King is an absolute monarch, and I mean absolute. Whatever he says, goes. There’s no council of nobles, no senate, nothing that remotely challenges the King’s authority. He’s got courtiers and bureaucrats, sure, but the whole empire is essentially his own private property, to rule as he pleases. It sounds like a recipe for disaster. Certainly such an arrangement always has been, in historical times. No empire can hope to have an unbroken string of capable rulers. This king or that one might be all right, and maybe as much as a century can go along without any troublemakers reaching the throne. But sooner or later some madman is bound to come along, a Nero or a Caligula or a Hitler, somebody who won’t be able to handle absolute power, who runs amok and causes terrible chaos."

"How frail, he thought, is the compact that holds our government together! Good will alone is all that sustains it."

"Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?” “The Divine—” “Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.”"

"They were apt to be disappointed with the way he fulfilled his promises to them, for he intended, if he could, to sweep both the bickering rivals from power. But he did not ask pure and total saintliness of himself in his dealings with those whose chief role in the government appeared to be to impede and obstruct."

"The Barjazid does not yet rule as an absolute tyrant, for that might turn the people against him, and he is still insecure in his power—while you live. But he rules for himself and for his family, not for Majipoor. He lacks a sense of right, and does only what seems useful and expedient. As his confidence grows, so too will his crimes, until Majipoor groans under the whip of a monster."

"“We are not accustomed to threats here,” Lorivade declared. “I make no threat. I speak only of inevitable consequences.”"

"“But why?” he asked Deliamber. The Vroon replied, “Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress.”"

"“Come,” Deliamber said. “There is a vast journey ahead of us.” “I know. That’s why I don’t want to get up.”"

"I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen."

"“You speak very generally,” Valentine said. “I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly."

"“What matters,” he said earnestly, “is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience.”"

"Am I loyal, or am I loyal? But I don’t like the way things are going. It’s a citizen’s right to worry about the state of the realm, isn’t it? If matters are not to our liking, we should speak up. That’s our tradition, isn’t it? If we allow small abuses now, who knows what sort of things he’ll be doing five years on!"

"I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?"

"Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present."

"It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality."

"So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men."

"No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there."

"“This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.” “So?” “What do I need it for?” “Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.”"

"Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers."

"We are born by accident into a purely random universe."

"Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art?"

"The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die."

"Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject."

"Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all."

"My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles."

"“All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.”"

"What value is lineage to a drowning man?"

"Love of others begins with love of self."

"Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul."

"All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context."

"The style in which it was written told me much: I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice."

"How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!"

"But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank."

"You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams."

"It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself."

"But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition."

"She seems fond of him. Getting to know him better, as though she has surmounted the barrier of cultural differences that made him seem so alien to her before. And he the same with her. The separations dwindling. Her world is not his, but he thinks he could adjust to some of its unfamiliar assumptions. Strike up a closeness. He’s a man, she’s a woman, right? The basics. All the rest is façade."

"Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you."

"What counts is what’s happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that’s a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day."

"When you treat a rational autonomous creature as though he’s a mere beast, what does that make you?"

"Nothing was his business, these days. When a man had no business, he had to appoint himself to some. So he was here to do research, ostensibly, which is to say to snoop and spy."

"Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured."

"The higher powers reward us most tenderly by their absence from our lives."

"The funeral customs of alien races defy all comprehension. So do the funeral customs of non-alien races. Can you explain to me the virtue of putting dead people in a box and burying the box in the ground?"