It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.

I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. " "What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?

Different times and different structures make more sense at one point in life than at another.