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They measure rank as Mussolini did, by the amount of carpet between door and desk.

Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truths. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim.

Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?

People often forget that they too are subject to the whims of the sea, that their flesh and bone can be pulled down and swallowed up just like anything else. But the sea remembers. It remembers everything, from the smallest broken shell to the largest sunken ship.

Patience is a narcotic for the weak.

In the universe of power, all transactions proceed in more directions than one.

Human beings have never been very adult about cleaning up after themselves.

I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love.

In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it.

A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves.

We live in a world where the powerful can do what they want and the rest of us just have to accept it

Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble.