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I also know you cannot pick and choose. Change is a medicine bundle. You must refuse it altogether, or take the whole thing.

Think. You have had your dealings with our bureaucracy. It is impossible not to, especially if one is a foreigner. Believe me, when we set our minds to it we can tangle, obstruct, and bring to a dead halt a herd of stampeding elephants.

Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible.

“Evolution is cut-and-try. If I may anthropomorphize,” he added. “Often it’s hard not to.”

“We do need something to lift us out of ourselves. It’s wrong to carry our pettinesses along to the stars.”

“We will, though,” he said. “We can’t help it. How do you escape being what you are?”

We Russians have learned to fear anarchy above all else. We would rather have tyranny than it. Hanno, you do wrong to look on people’s republics, strong governments of every kind, as always evil. Freedom is perhaps better, but chaos is worse.

Well, everybody got stupid now and then, especially in war.

I seek occasional relief in old books. They help me tell the transient from the enduring.

I never set myself up as a prophet. Those crazy preachers have been the death of thousands, and the end is not yet.

“‘Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Yeah, trouble is, the three classes of people aren’t the same.”

What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little?

The universe held as many surprises as it did stars. No, more. That was its glory. But someday one of them was bound to kill you.