"The real thing—that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not …"

"Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its probl…"

"She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself."

"Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech."

"And wasn’t that a common pattern in human history! Greedy religious orders, wanting to keep power for themselves, usi…"

"Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the wor…"

"How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural instituti…"

"A conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking."

"But it would be anecdotal evidence only, undocumentable and, by definition, unrepeatable. Therefore, not science."

"I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and ma…"