"When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices."

"The less depth a belief system has, the greater the fervency with which its adherents embrace it."

"As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper -- and in a hurry."

"The problem with mutiny," Drake said, "is that when you've finished you're left with a crew of mutineers."

"When you are presented hateful choices, you can only measure the cost of not acting."

"You could always count on people to become irrational when they imagined losing something they thought belonged to them. The illusion of scarcity was a powerful weapon when deployed correctly."

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

"What we do is more important that what we mean."

"Nothing means anything anymore. Everything is just presentation. Life is a giant spectacle."

"Privacy was funny like that; people would readily give up their own for a chance to infringe on everyone else's."

"His aunt Louisa asked him if he had made peace with God, and he replied, 'I did not know we had ever quarreled'."

On the death and dying of Henry David Thoreau.

"Knowledge is important, but much more important is the use toward which it is put. This depends on the heart and mind of the one who uses it."

"It was a - an obstacle. A disability. An injury, not just to his brain, but to his thinking."

"People acted, in short, by projecting their desires. Well - but of course. Wasn't that the point?"

"Amazing how quickly people developed sets of habits. They could not do without them, Frank had concluded. Even his improvised life was full of them. It might be said that now he had an array of habits that he chose from, a kind of menu."

"All part of the newly secure environment as envisioned in the Homeland Security acts. That these people had chosen a Nazi title for their enterprise was presumably more a tribute to their ignorance and stupidity than to any evil intent. Nevertheless it was not reassuring."

"Every day people come to me because I've got some power, and I watch them debase themselves or go silly in some way. I see them go corrupt right before my eyes. It's depressing. It's like having the Midas touch in reverse, where everything you touch turns to shit."

"And yet why did things live? What got them through it really? What made them make all these efforts, when death lay in wait at the end for every one of them?"

"An excess of reason is itself a form of madness."

"But they are not taught to think! In fact they're taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with."

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine."