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      "text": "What kind of man takes a live bomb across the seas in order to blow up other people? People who have mothers and lovers and children, just like him? Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex thought. Or, worse, both.",
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      "text": "A hallmark of sanity, Alex, is the courage to face even unpleasant points of view.",
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      "text": "The good side of the world media village was the sense it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely new.",
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      "text": "Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.",
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      "text": "One of life’s joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks...who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it.",
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      "slug": "apocalypses-apparently-are",
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      "text": "Apocalypses, apparently, are subject to fashion like everything else. What terrifies one generation can seem obsolete and trivial to the next. Take our modern attitude toward war. Most anthropologists now think this activity was based originally on theft and rape—perhaps rewarding enterprises for some caveman or Viking, but no longer either sexy or profitable in the context of nuclear holocaust! Today, we look back on large-scale warfare as an essentially silly enterprise.",
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      "text": "History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.",
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      "text": "What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.",
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      "text": "Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.",
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      "text": "It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.",
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      "text": "Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can’t afford anymore.",
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      "text": "They saw the end coming, he thought, looking down the file of awful figures. But they were dead wrong about the reasons why. They assumed only gods had the power to wreak such havoc on their world, but people caused the devastation here. Alex felt compassion for the ancient Pasquans—but a superior sort nevertheless. In blaming gods, they had conveniently diverted censure from the real culprit. The designer of weapons. The feller of trees. The destroyer. Man himself.",
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      "text": "Look at all the happiest, sanest people you've known, Nelson. Really listen to them. I bet you'll find they don’t fear a little inconsistency or uncertainty now and then. Oh, they try always to be true to their core beliefs, to achieve their goals and keep their promises. Still, they also avoid too much rigidity, forgiving the occasional contradiction and unexpected thought. They are content to be many.",
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      "text": "Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.",
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      "text": "Beware of assumptions that seem “obvious” in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.",
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      "text": "We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.",
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      "text": "On this occasion, despite the wind and sparkling stars, they looked just like huge chunks of stone, pathetically chiseled by desperate folk to resemble stern gods. People did bizarre things when they were afraid...as most men and women had been for nearly all the time since the species evolved.",
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