There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

-"Then what," Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar´s obvious enthusiasm, "is making you smile about a disaster?" -"Well, first, I didn´t cause it! Nothing to do with me, hands clean. Always a bonus.

Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.