"“Well, I’ll try to sketch it out for you, but I’ll have to repeat stuff I’ve told you before.” “That’s all right. I’m a simon-pure layman. My basic thought habits were formed early in the Iron Age. Where it comes to science, I can use plenty of repetition.”"

"It would annoy me less that we’re heading into a new puritanical era if the puritanism concerned itself about things that matter."

"No amount of money would stave off a nuclear warhead."

"Once this was a free country. Oh, I always knew that couldn’t last, that here too things were bound to grind back to the norm—masters and serfs, whatever names they go by. And so far we continue happier than most of the world ever was. But damn, modern democracy has the technology to regiment us beyond anything Caesar, Torquemada, Suleyman, or Louis XIV dared dream of."

"Well, everybody got stupid now and then, especially in war."

"“Is that all he wants?” McCready wondered. “Shuffling papers in an office, forever?”"

"Corruption rewards its favorites with jobs."

"I seek occasional relief in old books. They help me tell the transient from the enduring."

"Think. You have had your dealings with our bureaucracy. It is impossible not to, especially if one is a foreigner. Believe me, when we set our minds to it we can tangle, obstruct, and bring to a dead halt a herd of stampeding elephants."

"She seldom bothered taking revenge. Time did that for her, eventually."

"I’ve seen so many gods come and go, what’s one more?"

"I never set myself up as a prophet. Those crazy preachers have been the death of thousands, and the end is not yet."

"Who can make a medicine against time?"

"I also know you cannot pick and choose. Change is a medicine bundle. You must refuse it altogether, or take the whole thing."

"“Your Eminence is as great a man as I have ever met.” “Then God have mercy on humankind,” Richelieu replied."

"You shall depart freely. Caution enjoins me to have you arrested and garroted within this hour. Either you are a charlatan and deserve it or a mortal danger and require it. However, I deem you a sensible man who will withdraw to his obscurity. And I am grateful to you for a fascinating glimpse of—what is best left alone."

"If you continue a liar, you are as skillful a one as I have found in a wide experience."

"I have learned much in two thousand years, but nothing about any gods, except that they too, arise, change, age, and die. Whatever there is beyond the universe, if anything, I doubt it concerns itself with us."

"He had intended to say that such was the nature of power. Seizing it and holding it were alike filthy."

"I heard too many answers, I met too many gods. Abroad they call on Christ, but if you fare southward long enough it is Muhammad; and eastward it is Gautama Buddha, save where they say the world is a dream of Brahm, or offer to a host of gods and ghosts and elves like ours in these Northlands. And almost every man I asked told me that his folk know the truth while the rest are benighted. Could I but hear a word I felt even half sure of—"

"That is forgotten, their wars and their deeds and their very speech. Wisdom lasts. It is what I have sought across the world."

"He did not share the widespread present-day faith in astrology. It seemed likeliest to him that sheer accident ruled the world."

"Nothing in excess, including self-denial."

"We can hardly expect conventional respectability of a person whose goal in life is enlightenment."

"What else is life but always bidding farewell?"

"“He says giants built it in the morning of the world,” Hanno told Pytheas. “Then his people are as ignorant as we,” the Greek said low."

"“Not that any simple principle exists, and not that I couldn’t be wrong. But it seems to me—well, that which we are, our society or culture or what you want to name it, has a life and a right of its own.” He drew breath. “Best beloved,” he said, “if communities didn’t resist encroachments, they’d soon be swallowed by the biggest and greediest. Wouldn’t they? In the end, dead sameness. No challenges, no inspirations from somebody else’s way. What service is it to life if we let that happen?"

"Then he decided that nothing was more impractical than misplaced practicality."

"The best foundation that a decision is ever allowed is our fallible assessment of the probabilities."

"Your trouble is, the Old Faith reinforces every wish to kill that war has roused in you."

"Man’s duty in this life, he thought, is to choose the lesser evil."

"We, the proper civil government, approved your defense measures of the past several years, though you are aware that I myself always considered them excessive. When I think of the prosperity that tax money, those resources, could have brought, left in private hands—or the social good it could have done in the public sector— Give you military your heads, and you’d build bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future."

"I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder."

"Silence fell. The clock on my mantel ticked aloud and the wind outside flowed past like a river."

"Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who’d been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis’s purposes, he’d never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infallibility."

"Above everything else, perhaps, was today’s concept of working together. I don’t mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that “togetherness,” be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and maintains well-developed channels to carry all ideas to the leadership and back again."

"Did ignorance save his freedom, or merely his illusion of freedom?"

"Be calm. A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right."

"The old man murmured: “Aye, we draw to an end. Dying hurts. Nonetheless the forefathers were wise who in their myths made Nan coequal with Lesu. A thing which endured forever would become unendurable. Death opens a way, for peoples as well as for people.”"

"“Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?” “Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fail in the end—disastrously—but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!”"

"Mortal combat corrupts, and war corrupts absolutely."

"Bombing: A method of warfare which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned because of its effects upon women, children, the aged, the sick, and other non-combatants, unless these happen to have resided in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Osaka, etc., though not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Cf. missile."

"His conscience must have gotten tired of nagging him and delivered an ultimatum."

"A cultured, sensitive, observant man is a pleasure to be with in any age."

"“I really liked that girl.” “Not loved, evidently,” I observed. “N-n-no. I supposed not. Though what is love, anyway? Doesn’t it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and mutations and quantum jumps that— Never mind.”"

"“If anything does change man,” he said, “it’s science and technology. Just think about the fact—while it lasts—that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.”"

"The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.”"