“I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me...”

“The one on the left," Worthil said, "is a male, carrying the testes and penis. The middle one is equipped with a kind of reversible vagina, and ovaries. The vagina turns inside-out to implant the f...”

“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.”

“A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the h...”

“...a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybodys either for it or against it, were against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way...”

“What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient...”

“As some people turned to religion for comfort, so, Highsmith wrote in her notebook in September 1970, she took refuge in her belief that she was making progress as a writer. But she realised that b...”

“Its important that what thoughts you are feeding into your mind because your thoughts create your belief and experiences. You have positive thoughts and you have negative ones too. Nurture your min...”

“Reason, Observation and Experience the Holy Trinity of Science have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This...”

“A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had.”

“Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a p...”

“They declare that it is unpatriotic and disruptive to question the workings of authority--but patriotic to institute harsh and regressive policies that benefit the wealthy, undermine social program...”

“I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis”

“There is even a certain tendency to punish those who do try to see. A case in point: At the dawn of the sexual revolution, social scientists produced statistical studies purporting to show that chi...”

“It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did ...”