Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because,ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.

The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.

Emigrate or Degenerate.

The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by - or despite - its outcry.

Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

He entered the elevator and together they moved closer to god

When he turned on the tape-transport once more, Arctor was saying, "-- as near as I can figure out, God is dead." Luckman answered, "I didn't know He was sick.