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

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?

Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

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

I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.