Every man's in his own hands, with a little help from his brothers.

Men are fools who forget what really matters while time goes by.

Be polite to all, friendly to none. Be professional. Be ready to kill everyone and everything.

Death's easy to find. If She wants you, you'll meet Her here as well as anywhere.

Sometimes a man does what he'd most like to avoid.

"Godling? Demigod?" Lysis nearly howled. "You'd be beaten black and blue in Thebes, and staked out overnight for claims like that. In Sparta, the secret police would ambush you, violate you, skin you alive and use your skull for a drinking cup."

Very little in science fiction can transcend the gimmickry of a technical conceit, yet without that conceit at its heart a book is not truly science fiction. Furthermore, so little emerging thought and technology is employed by sf writers today that the genre is lagging far behind reality both in the cosmology area and the technology area: sf is no longer a place to experiment, but is now very derivative.