The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.

Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.

I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.

Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.

If a pig goes upon the threshing-floor, or a field, or a garden, and the owner of the meadow, or the field, or the garden smites it so that it die, he shall give it back to its owner; but if he does not give it back, he becomes a thief.