Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and has powers of reality.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he or she is in. That person must reflect what is projected upon him or her.

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers. Nothing. Nothing can be done.

The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.