Then you're dead, too, sweet little sister.' Oh, yes,' said Valentine. 'They'll believe that. "I didn't know it would kill Andrew. And when he was dead, I didn't know it will kill Valentine too.

I'm never impossible. The most I ever allow myself is to be somewhat unlikely.

History is an omlette. THe eggs are already broken.

The problem with elections is that anybody who wants an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it. And anybody who does not want an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it, either. Government office should be received like a child’s Christmas present, with surprise and delight. Instead it is usually received like a diploma, an anticlimax that never seems worth the struggle to earn it.

You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

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.