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

There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart.

One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man even a fellow man striving to do the same to you creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.

Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents - conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.