"Both Rand and Rothbard, overeager to seal the case for expelling the state from the economy that economic arguments alone apparently could not clinch, had to cast themselves as participants in a Manichean struggle against unscrupulous wrongdoers with impure motives. This already betokened a deep complacency about the validity of their own views, such that anyone who disagreed with them must be a deliberate enemy of truth; and it marked the beginning of the anti-intellectualism that continues to disfigure libertarian thought. The virtually unanimous opposition of scholars and intellectuals to a view as self-evidently true as libertarianism seems to be to Rand and Rothbard must, they thought, be a function of the intellectuals’ perversity (rather than of weaknesses of libertarian argument and evidence)."

"Why, if (as Boaz maintains) the liberty of a human being to own another should be trumped by equal human rights, the liberty to own large amounts of property should not also be trumped by equal human rights?"

"The left has, in practice, been prevented from taking advantage of its own frequent disagreements with public opinion by its historically contingent attachment to democratic politics as the primary means to its ends. This allegiance has forced leftist political and cultural critics to presuppose the possibility of rational democratic politics—if only the corrupting influences of money, commercialization, and corporate control could be excised. Libertarians have the basis for a deeper critique of modern culture: they understand that what corporations sell, consumers want to buy. But, precluded by their own ideology—which effectively celebrates whatever consumers choose as, ipso facto, good—from criticizing consumerism, libertarians end up being as unthinkingly apologetic about mass culture in its commercial manifestations as the left is about mass culture in its political guise."

"Ninety percent of life was being there, and the rest was being there on time."

"The only place to go now is into the context. If you can find it. Between the context and the content, between the mainline and the hardline, falls the shadow."

"If you can’t fuck it, and it doesn’t dance, eat it or throw it away."

"Reaching in, he wrapped the exposed wires around his fingers and ripped them out. The locks released, letting the door fall open a crack. “That’s what we call a Luddite hack.”"

"Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way."

"The Beater has still been young enough to feel immortal, at least on his better days. It was all, Wow, if we don’t slow down, we’re gonna die before we get old, except somehow it hadn’t happened that way. So they’d all assumed it never would, not dying, not getting old—hell, not even growing up."

"Nothing stays the same, Gina, nothing works forever. If I don’t like it, that’s too bad. If you don’t like it, that’s still too bad."

"He had the sudden urge to put his arms around her, but the look on her face said that if he made a move toward her, she would move away, and maybe she would keep moving away from him until the distance between them was too great to cross again in one lifetime."

"It was a lonely thing. There was no way to be sure if it meant the same thing to both of you. He’d forgotten that part of making love, how you couldn’t assume that intent was as joined as bodies were."

"If you’re really going to die on me, you could at least rub my neck before you go."

"“‘Truth is cheap, but information costs.’ I can’t remember who said that.” “Vince What’s-His-Name,” said Sam. “Died in a terrorist raid or something. I thought you said all information should be free.” “It should. It isn’t. Knowledge is power. But power corrupts. Which means the Age of Fast Information is an extremely corrupt age in which to live.” “Aren’t they all?” Sam asked him."

"Keep your best whiskey in a bottle marked ‘mouthwash.’"

"It gets tricky here, but it’s always seemed to be that sanity is, or can be, as relative as anything else. Sacrifice an animal to Zeus and predict the future from the formation of its entrails—do that as a general in ancient Greece hoping for victory in a coming battle and you’re prudent. Do it today and you’re a clinical paranoid and a mean one, too. Sanity, like customs and manners, seems to have a strong basis in the accepted standards of a particular time and place."

"That was it, then, civilization was officially collapsed if the cops had stopped ticketing abandoned cars and roosted on them instead."

"Old responses live long, die hard, and frequently leave a troublesome corpse."

"Help him by helping him resist your help."

"The authenticity may have been dubious, but the excitement had been real."

"Truth and information are not the same thing!"

"“Truth and information are not the same thing. I promise you that’s a fact.” “So you told yourself. But you have to admit that they do coincide often enough to let us all get around in the world safely.”"

"Fusion power we licked; static cling has us on the ropes. It’s a funny world."

"And that vulgar gold lamé upholstery giving me a rash. You can dispute taste but you can’t stop it."

"If a dataline is running and there’s no one there to watch it, has anything really happened?"

"I remembered the sign in front of the cathedral:"

"Some people gain freedom by trading one form of bondage for another."

"I said, What are you, a federal employee or just a freelance zombie?"

"Everybody wants to be somebody but nobody wants to be just anybody."

"Meditation was such a loose term; you can do almost anything mentally and call it meditation."

"Maybe it’s better to be half of something wonderful than a whole nothing at all."

"“Is that the way you feel about it?” I asked. “I’m a lawyer. I deal with the law as it is, not how I feel about it.”"

"I pushed her back hard. “You don’t belong with them; you’re not special, you have no place in any unseen world; you’re like me and the rest of our family. Get used to it!” She looked at me like I’d slapped her. “Oh, sorry,” I said, feeling equally stung by her reaction. “It’s hell being ordinary, but that’s the human condition.”"

"If fasting really had anything to do with enlightenment then millions of people throughout the ages had died of the secret of life. And the secret of life was, in its entirety, that starvation hurt like a bastard."

"Fez gave her a squeeze. “You’re a genius, Sam-I-Am.” She squirmed away from him uncomfortably. “It just makes sense, is all.” “Sometimes that’s all it takes to be a genius.”"

"Mindplayers didn't really address a lot about the criminal element of this particular world. Everybody in the Mindplayers world couldn't possibly live like the few people that you saw. A lot of times, a culture almost seems to float on top of its own black market, and things from that filter up through the culture. I get the feeling that this law-abiding peaceful thing that I live in now is almost never-never land - to a certain extent it's not even really real. I spent a decade working for Hallmark cards, which is supposed to epitomise sweetness and light and good living and ethics and morals. But Hallmark, like many American manufacturers, has a lot of things like toys and ornaments manufactured in the Far East, by people in sweat-shops. These are children, old people, poor people, people who don't have enough to eat; we get these things so cheaply because we simply use these people and throw them away. This is what I mean about our culture, our never-never land, floating on top of our underworld."

"That was the real price, I thought. Once you had power, you ended up having to depend on it. Eventually, like anything else, it owned you. Eventually? No, from the beginning; we just don’t bother admitting it at first."

"If you need someone to believe something, make them go for a walk with you. Walking takes up most of the energy they’d use to disbelieve you."

"There were those who insisted this had already happened, but they could never come up with any solid examples, only vague stories involving the cousin of a daughter of a friend-of-a-friend who overheard someone on an all-night bus telling someone else about it."

"Technology disgusts me. My senses tell me what I need to know. The rest is noise."

"All the things we hide in water Hoping we won't see them go. Forests growing under water Press against the ones we know."

"When you hear that a certain man is so good that he wants to help everybody, you may depend upon it that he started the story."

"A loafer never works except when there's a fire; then he will carry out more furniture than anybody."

"A man who does not fool himself seldom cares much about fooling others. But the man who claims to have seen a ghost wants everybody else to believe in ghosts."

"Of living creatures, business men are nearest sane; their philosophy is as accurate as their multiplication table."

"I know what women expect, and give it to them without disagreeable argument; they'll get it anyway."

"When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face."

"Silliness which would have broken a politician twenty years ago, now makes his fortune."

"We are now confronted with the necessity of remedying the remedies."

"The experience of the world is worth more than the experience of any one man."