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Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.

Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.

Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there’s a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don’t like it very much.

The uplifters are forever running around telling blockheads they would do better if they would believe in themselves. But they already do. That is why they are blockheads.

It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.

The idiots always rose to the top and made policy.

It explained a lot of things.

Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.

In the larger scale of things, his opinions didn’t count anyhow. The politicians made the decisions, and the voters paid no attention.

A man is entitled to only one great passion in a lifetime. Whether it’s music or a profession or a woman, everything else pales in its afterglow. The searing shock so changes one’s chemistry that if the object is lost, the experience can never be repeated. Only anticlimax remains.

“Organized mayhem,” Nick commented, “seems to be the chief preoccupation of intelligent species everywhere.”

“One should always be skeptical. That’s always been our problem. We have too many believers.”

“Believers in what?”

“In everything.”

The problem is that too often the only people who can act don’t want change. Power doesn’t so much corrupt as it breeds conservatism.