I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others

You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.