It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting - corruption and favoritism, mostly- endemic to the system.

There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!

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.

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.

One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.