"I was trying to avoid the cliché all too common in science fiction, even today, of a whole population feeling itself oppressed and waiting only for a leader to rise in a body against its overlords. No government for which that was actually the case could last a minute. There must always be a majority who have some stake in things as they are, whether that stake consist of wealth and power or simply of law, order, and predictability. Moreover, most people cannot really imagine any system working which is very different from the one they are used to. Hence they find rationalizations for it. Even slaves often do this."

"Her rank was higher than his, so high that no one in her family worked productively."

"I say that a God who would come between two who have been to each other what we have been, is not one I would heed."

"What I want is to commune with the land. In company I couldn’t admit that. It’d sound too pompous, as though I were from Greenpeace or the People’s Republic of Berkeley."

"Inland, all except criminals lived in a tightly pulled net of regulations, duties, social standing, tax collection, expectations of how to act and speak and think—“sort of like late twentieth-century USA” Everard grumbled to himself."

"There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived."

"Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the catalogue."

"Know that against time the gods themselves are powerless."

"What was right? A man should live justly—but too often it was hard to say which was the road of justice. At any rate, this war was not a struggle of evil against good, black against white; it was a fight between many human beings, none of whom was wholly bad or wholly good."

"I cannot believe you harbor any illusions about the barbarians being nature’s noblemen. I soon lost mine. They were every bit as ruthless. They were simply less efficient."

"“So this,” he said, “is the excitement and glory of war! I’ll never believe a ballad singer again.”"

"I’m still spry, but I feel the teeth gnawing, and believe me, my friends, it was better to be young."

"We must understand that what Pascal said is true of every human being in the whole of space-time, ourselves included—“The last act is tragic, however pleasant all the comedy of the other acts. A little earth on our heads, and all is done with forever.”—understand it in our bones, so that we can live with it calmly if not serenely."

"What I’m trying to make you know, not in your forebrain but in your marrow, is that reality never conforms very well to the textbooks, and sometimes it doesn’t conform at all."

"Winter lay among the Outer Hebrides. Day was a sullen glimmer between two darknesses, often smothered in snow. When it did not fling itself upon the rocks and burst in freezing spume, the North Atlantic rolled in heavy and gnawing. There was no real horizon; leaden waves met leaden sky and misty leaden light hid the seam."

"Heim ignored the mob scene on the 3V, rested his eyes on the cold serenity of the Milky Way and thought that this, at least, would endure."

"“I wonder if there are any gods at all—if they aren’t just another story.” Tom and Owl shrank from him. But no lightning struck."

"Here was more than a question of law; it was a matter of whose will should prevail."

"His will grew tight again. This was no age for weaklings. You had to do whatever seemed best, without letting gods or men or the lower devils deter you."

"Everard was not so sure; he had seen enough human misery in all the ages. You got case-hardened after a while, but down underneath, when a peasant stared at you with sick brutalized eyes, or a soldier screamed with a pike through him, or a city went up in radioactive flame, something wept. He could understand the fanatics who had tried to change events. It was only that their work was so unlikely to make anything better..."

"He was no respecter of windy theories about inborn racial traits, but there was something to be said for traditions so ancient as to be unconscious and ineradicable."

"“You are very honest about the situation of your own country.” Deirdre said roughly, “Most of us won’t admit it, but I think it best to look truth in the eyes.”"

"Man does not live by bread alone, nor guns, paperwork, theses, naked practicalities."

"So why was a civilian going armed? It bespoke a degree of lawlessness that fitted ill with a technological society."

"I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics like him."

"Everard sighed, switched off his conscience, and began lying."

"For himself, he had never thought it would be this bad. He had stopped remembering her, except maybe ten times a day, but now she came to him and the forgetting would have to be done all over again."

"Freedom brings responsibility and often guilt. It may indeed provide a deeper satisfaction and a richer life, but the evaluation of such rewards is a distressingly subjective process. Perhaps no argument in favor of liberty can satisfy the intellect; perhaps the best we can hope for is a shared emotional conviction."

"Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data."

"Iskilip is senile, more than half converted to his own artificial creed. He was mumbling about prophecies Val Nira made long ago, true prophecies. Bah! Tricks of memory and wishfulness."

"Anderson demonstrates that if one accepts a sham mystery as real, one has stopped or strayed in the search for truth, and truth has survival value."

"One can surrender one’s rational will to beliefs or habits as easily as to individuals, for essentially the same reasons, and with essentially the same results. Ideas have a mystery and power of their own."

"Say on. If you are a rogue, you are at least an interesting one."

"Mystery is in a way the guarantee of the boundlessness of the might of the ruler: power bound to reason must always have limitations, great though it may be."

"You can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly."

"No, the only way to sanity—to survival—is to abandon class prejudice and race hate altogether, and work as individuals. We’re all...well, Earthlings, and subclassification is deadly. We all have to live together, and might as well make the best of it."

"“You were right. We should never have created science. It brought the twilight of the race.” “I never said that. The race brought its own destruction, through misuse of science. Our culture was scientific anyway, in all except its psychological basis. It’s up to us to take that last and hardest step. If we do, the race may yet survive.”"

"One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day."

"“Lord, that war was crazy!” “All wars are,” said Drummond dispassionately. “but technology advanced to the point of giving us a knife to cut our throats with. Before that, we were just beating our heads against the wall. Robinson, we can’t go back to the old ways. We’ve got to start on a new track—a track of sanity.”"

"They tell me our kind was friendly with the old gods, and with older gods before them. Yet never have we made offering or worship. I’ve tried and failed to understand such things. Does a god need flesh or gold? Does it matter to him how you live? Does it swerve him if you grovel and whimper? Does he care whether you care about him?"

"A greedy man is an unlucky man."

"“Don’t talk, you,” he said. “It hurts my ears. Nor think; that hurts your head.’”"

"Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness."

"Time is the bridge that always burns behind us."

"Collectively as well as individually, man is never going to find perfection. Some societies he builds may work better, for the majority anyhow, than others. But all of them will have their built-in drawbacks. Their affairs will always be conducted with a high irreducible minimum of inefficiency. Read: sentimentalism, magical thinking, shortsightedness, vanity, greed, envy, hate, fear – not because we are evil but because we are mortal."

"We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?"

"Like sensible people throughout history, the average Phoenician wanted as little to do with his government as possible."

"I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art."

"Another irritating thing about Naqsans was their habit of solemnly repeating the obvious. In that respect they were almost as bad as humans."

"Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, “but this is frightful!” “Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.” His eye stabbed at hers. “Would you?” “Well… No.” “Locked among bleak brick walls for all her days; shorn, harshly clad, ill-fed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither that which God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time.…” “Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.” “Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You, too—in your heart—not so?—whether or not you have said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”"