What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce. ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.

I am not the river I am the net.

Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.

Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.