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I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everybody had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

“Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” Travis said.

“All the more reason to care about myself and others.”

Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about.

“When it comes to strangers with guns,” I told her, “I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.”

There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.

Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.

Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be.

He was surprised when I ignored him. He is wealthy and arrogant and used to being listened to even when what he says is nonsense—as it often is.

Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.

Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter.

“Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”