The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.

It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.

Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?

Find a nice, self sufficient hilltop, and fortify it.

...after all, what is a planet but an island in space?

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.