"They sat in small parties with a truculent quietness that sneered at and challenged the frantic hustle of the times and the belief that the hustle was leading anywhere."

"For a full century now Americans have been living in one of those ages of collective madness and herd delusion, comparable only to the Dutch tulip mania, the witchcraft dread, the dancing madness, Trotskyism, and the Crusades. Until 1950 ours might have been called the Automobile Mania, but now the imagination can only grope for a name—I’m writing an unpopular book on the subject, you see. Not that this current social madness is a deep secret or anything to be startled at. What other results could have been expected when American society began to overvalue on the one hand security, censorship, an imagined world-saving idealism and self-sacrifice in war, and on the other hand insatiable hunger for possessions, fiercely competitive aggressiveness, sadistic male belligerence, contempt for parents and the state, and a fantastically overstimulated sexuality?"

"The only thing robots couldn’t do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition."

"Hey, am I dreaming?...Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line? The second question, though not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for paranoia!"

"He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest With the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood."

"Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse."

"What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?"

"Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all."

"A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences."

"What is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb."

"Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class."

"After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. It all depends on the evidence. The evidence decides everything."

"“Conscience is only social pressure,” he told her, tense without quite knowing why, “the impulse to submerge your ego in that of the herd, and do what other people want you to because you’re afraid of their censure. Realistic self-interest frees a person from the childish restrictions of conscience.” “Are you sure of that, Jarles? What about your dreams? Conscience may be partly what you say it is, but it’s more than that. It’s hearkening to the wisest thoughts that have occurred to the minds of the human race.”"

"“Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. “They are unreal.” “They’re as real as anything else,” she shot back at him. “And they merely mean conscience.”"

"I suppose that every blundering idealist who hasn’t been brought face to face with the hard facts of life carries, at the back of his mind, a sneaking suspicion that villainy is a very dashing and romantic thing. When your mind turned turtle, or when they turned it for you, your new personality was necessarily fabricated out of all your fragmentary romantic notions of villainy—unlimited ambition and conceit, absolute lack of emotion, and all the rest of the supervillain ideology!"

"The idea of brutality actually shocks him, thought Goniface amusedly. I wonder what name he has for the toil we exact of the commoners, and the penances we impose on them?"

"He knew that ahead lay many perils—threats to his bodily welfare. And recently Jarles had come to have a great respect for that bag of flesh and bones which contained his ego."

"What is idealism? It is distortion. A giving of false values to things which in reality do not possess those values. Personalities differ chiefly in their pattern of values. When the values are largely false, the personality is unstable."

"“Armon Jarles, there is only the cosmos and the electronic entities that constitute it, without soul or purpose, save so far as neuronic minds impose purpose upon it. “Armon Jarles, the Hierarchy embodies the highest form of such purpose. “Armon Jarles, the supernatural and the idealized have one trait in common. They are not. There is only reality.”"

"No matter how hard and wearisome an age this might be, it was certainly a very exciting one with regard to manifestations of the supernatural."

"But now the priests think only one thing. How to hold on to their power as long as mankind lasts—until the sun darkens and the earth freezes!"

"“You have been told that the Great God rules the universe—earth and sky. I tell you the Great God is fake!”"

"Yes, indeed, he assured himself rapidly, things did seem to be working around to a grand payoff in the great game of trading heroic feats for intimate maidenly favors that all heroes lived or at least hoped by, no matter how disordered and irregular the bookkeeping."

"Great conquerors live on as their enemies’ devils."

"Old legends said Death had a skinny sister denominated Pain, passionately devoted to the loathsome torture that often was Death’s prelude."

"“Legends travel on rainbow wings and sport gaudy colors,” the harbormaster answered him, “while truth plods on in sober garb.”"

"And the mighty are great worriers and spend much time preventing anything that troubles their peace of mind."

"Women have power over men almost as great as gods do."

"Food for the hungry Isle. There was your real thinking man’s treasure, he told himself, beside which gold and twinkling jewels were merest trinkets, or the pointy breasts of young love or words of poets or the pointed stars themselves that astrologers cherished and that made men drunk with distance and expanse."

"Lord, what romantical fools men were, to overpass the known and good in order to strain and stretch after the mysterious merely unknown. Were dreams simply better than reality? Had fancy always more style?"

"But oh, this lifelong servitude to girls—whimsical, innocent, calculating, icicle-eyed and hearted, fleeting, tripping little demons! White, slim-necked, sharp-toothed, restlessly bobbing weasels with the soulful eyes of lemurs!"

"That was another trouble with women, they were never there when you wanted or really needed them. They helped each other, all right, but they expected men to do all sorts of impossible feats of derring-do to prove themselves worthy of the great gift of their love (and what was that when you got down to it?—a fleeting clench-and-wriggle in the dark, illuminated only by the mute, incomprehensible perfection of a dainty breast, that left you bewildered and sad)."

"Inconsiderate creatures, gods were."

"And just think what rare delights—nay, what whole sets of ecstasies and blisses—this much gold would buy. How fortunate that metal was mindless slave of the man who held it!"

"“There are some things man was not meant to know,” the Mouser said in a most portentous voice. Then, swiftly switching to the familiar, “or rather, since I am in no way superstitious, there are some things that have not yet yielded to our philosophy.”"

"For the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart."

"Now it may be that in the world of Newhon there are gods of whom even Death does not know and who from time to time take pleasure in putting obstacles in his path. Or it may be that Chance is quite as great a power as Necessity."

"The more brilliant the enchanted male, the stupider the enchanting female."

"When one achieves revenge, the innocent perforce suffer."

"This was ecstacy indeed, he assured himself. It seemed to him that he was now in the Ninth and topmost Heaven, where a few select heroes luxuriate and dream and submit themselves to almost unendurable pleasures, at whiles glancing down with lazy amusement at all the gods toiling at their sparrow-watching and incense-sniffing and destiny-directing on the many tiers below."

"With a happy roaring shout only he could hear, blood rushed through the Mouser’s arteries toward his center, reviving his limp manhood in a mere moment, as a magically summoned genie offhandedly builds a tower."

"He knew that sooner or later, in spite of all protecting charms and precautions, Death would creep silently on him or spring suddenly from some unguarded moment. This very night his horoscope might signal Death’s instant escapeless approach; and though men lived by lies, treating truth’s very self as lie to be exploited, the stars remained the stars."

"Let never the gems of business be mixed with the jewels of pleasure."

"The worst thing about mountain climbing is that the easy parts go so quickly."

"Knowledge takes precedence over death."

"He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows."

"Eventually the tale came to an end, suddenly and seemingly in the middle, like a piece of foreign music."

"They are in their fashion fearless, irreligiously considering themselves the coequals of destiny and having only contempt for the Demigoddess of Chance, the Imp of Luck, and the Demon of Improbability."