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“I say, old man, you’re developing something of a persecution complex, I’m afraid—”

“That’s easy, when you’re persecuted.”

“It’s a failing of your culture,” Foster said, “that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You’re too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all ‘established facts.’”

I wanted to tell him that all lives are the same length when viewed from the foreshortened perspective of death, and that life, like music, requires no meaning but only a certain symmetry.

It was easy to see the mechanics of schizophrenia at work here. From wishing, it was an easy jump to believe.

There’s nothing like a little slavery to make a man appreciate even a modest portion of freedom.

I was still alive, but that was a mere detail, subject to change. (p. 13)

Adventure has been defined as somebody else having a difficult time, a long way away. (p. 17)

I want men who, like you, would not take orders even if I should give them. I do not want to be a god, Crag, even though I have some powers beyond mankind’s; I would not let my new world be colonized by people who might even be tempted to obey me.

Stealthily the computer advanced, vanguard of the technological revolution, hailed as the cure for all mankind's ills and denounced as the baleful force which would first enslave and then destroy us all.

“You’re talking to yourself.”

“It’s all right. I’m not listening.” (p. 78)

Strangely, he wasn’t scared at all. He was even more coldly calm, calmly analytical. And he knew that he would have to be if he was to stand a chance to win this war. If he was to win it, his mind would have to be his major weapon; firearms might win a battle, but never the war.

It was not the fashion for politicians who aspired to elective office to live ostentatiously, no matter how much money they had. If they loved luxury—and most of them did—they indulged that love in ways less publicly obvious than by living in mansions. The public believes what it thinks it sees.