Delirium, dream, death—Three-D. What was the fourth? — Justina Robson

What’s the point of history, if it has nothing to say to the present?

The gun is a consequence of our minds. If we were in love with peace, and had no will to destroy each other, there would be no gun.

It is the rare person who can stand aside and observe that our minds and identities are largely constructs of our social order, that we are abstract and arbitrary collections of ideas that resemble dusty archives in the galleries of a museum, visited by nobody, and maintained by a series of those insensible robots that are our habits.