It's an ancient technique known as lying, Khouri.

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero.

Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.

It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems.

How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’ ‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.

As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn't built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.