If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream up the idea of immortality. Long before that (in evolutionary terms) all species with brains have the survival instinct in some form. So, I am just saying that there are many existent proofs of species that have one, but not the other.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.

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.

Two tires fly. Two Wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down From it, warring songs.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.