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Well-intentioned men don’t run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.

It’s common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side rather than theirs.

If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

Even though he wasn’t entirely convinced of the truth of what he was saying, the fact of saying it was curiously reassuring to his mind.

He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one’s acts destroyed.

What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don’t know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.

If “media” is the plural of “medium” the question is: how many of them are fraudulent?

“I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”

“I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”

“What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”

What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hogwash about students at college having to be treated as adults—there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!

It’s okay to be a responsible member of society if only you know what you’re going to be held responsible for.

You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.

“How does it feel to have just changed the course of history?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the navigator. “To my way of thinking, by the time history happens I’m going to be dead.”