They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.

That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.