There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind.

Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made—the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.” He spread his hands apart like an explosion going off. “When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him.

Sometimes a thing needed opening before closure was found.

It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.

We devolve into animals when we creep near to death.

It’s easy to forgo distractions and to not accumulate things when you have a larger goal on the horizon.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.