"Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance. Soldiers shoot in the back, lay traps and ambushes, lie to the enemy and outnumber the other bastard every chance they get. Your kind of murder only works among civilians."

"Humans will always act to preserve their own lives — except for the times when they don’t."

"Doesn’t it occur to you that the very fact that you’re asking me this question tells me there’s something else for me to figure out, and therefore greatly increases the chance that I will figure it out?"

"Once they understood our autonomy, the seed of their defeat was sown."

"We don't always get the leader that we want," said Graff. "But sometimes we get to choose among the leaders that we have."

"Your life is going to be short," said Anton. "And at the end, there will be pain, physical and emotional. You will grow too large for this world, too large for your heart."

"My friendships were not... transcendent. They were all tied to my work, and when my work went away, so did all my friends. They were not unkind, they still inquired after me, they made overtures, but there was nothing to say, our minds and our hearts did not really touch at any point. I discovered that I did not know anybody, and nobody knew me."

"You fight dirty." "I fight like a girl."

"I'm not having children." "That's the best part," she said. "I'll have them for you." "You know what I meant," said Bean. "It's not done by kissing, so you're safe so far."

"You saved the world. All of humanity is your progeny. And yet... it is empty, isn't it? They didn't take it away from you the way they took my work from me. But time has taken it away. It's in the past, and yet you are still alive, so what is your life for?"

"Ignorance is not a tragedy," said Anton, "merely an opportunity. But to know and refuse to know what you know, that is foolishness."

"Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man who's lying in this box?"

"Life is a suicide mission."

"Is the brain a map that leads down twisted paths and into hidden corners? Then when we die, the map is lost but perhaps some explorer could wander through that strange landscape and find out the hiding places of our misplaced memories."

"Love was the genes of all creatures demanding that they be replicated, replicated, replicated."

"All our rationalities are invented to justify what we were going to do anyway before we thought of any reasons."

"Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die."

"But he did love her, with all his heart he loved her. All his heart? All of it he knew about."

"You couldn't bear to let another man leave you, so you left him first."

"What does it matter, to tell yourself that the thing controlling you comes from outside, if in fact you only experience it inside your own heart? Where can you run from it? How can you hide?"

"You'd think she'd learn something from that. But she still does the same thing. Making decisions that deform other people’s lives, without consulting them, without ever conceiving that perhaps they don't want her to save them from whatever supposed misery she's saving them from."

"I have been a slave. But at least in all that time I knew my own heart. I knew what I truly thought even as I did what they wanted, whatever it took to get what I wanted from them."

"What had been lost was found again. And those who had been hungry without knowing the name of their hunger, were fed."

"Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones."

"I'm all the more in need of good advice, since I can’t actually conceive of needing any."

"If only we were wiser or better people perhaps the gods would explain the mad, unbearable things they do."

"The mob still had anger in it, some of them at least. Yet there were so many who were sick of it all, many who were already ashamed, already discovering in their hearts the terrible acts they had performed tonight, when their souls were given over to the will of the mob."

"Because everybody dies, you'll always feel cheated. But you're the cheat... You're the one who uses our love for you to try to control us."

"Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet."

"The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge."

"She might be protective and possessive with her children whom she thought of as needing her, but with the people she needed, she was the opposite. If she feared they would be taken from her, she withdrew from them; she stopped permitting herself to need them."

"Who is more cursed, the one who dies, unknowing until the very moment of his death or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?"

"All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe."

"I’m trying to conceive of something inconceivable. I'm trying to find answers to questions that humans beings have never even tried to ask."

"Your trust in rationality makes you irrational."

"You've done all this thinking, you've seen all the possibilities for the future - good ones and bad ones alike — and yet the only ones you are willing to believe in, the imagined future that you seize upon as the foundation for all your moral judgments, is the only future in which everyone that you and I have ever loved and everything we'd ever hoped for must be obliterated."

"Yes, she was opinionated, headstrong, bossy, and quick to reach conclusions. But she could also listen to an opposing view, change her mind when she needed to. She could listen, and so he could speak. Perhaps with her he could still be [himself]."

"Genocide leads to the end of a person's life. link Xenocide"

"To stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make this person stop wanting to do it."

"Why did I come? I didn't come. I went. I wasn't coming here, to meet these people. I was leaving there. Getting away. Only I tricked myself."

"No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought of what he was doing when he did it and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain of what he will do next."

"He had the decency to be appalled by his own brutality."

"We pretend to be whatever we must in order to survive."

"When have you ever seen someone who had no doubts who was also correct about anything?"

"You're only so sure you're right because they're so sure you're wrong."

"We never forbid where we do not also have the power to prevent."

"If you act as the enemy of life, then life will become your enemy."

"No doubt it was all an elaborate pretense at normality, but in Valentine's experience, normality was always a pretense, people acting out what they thought were their expected roles."

"If you tell what you know, everybody is wiser. If you keep a secret, than everyone is a fool."