Consciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?

Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.

The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose.