You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes you'll see.

Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid.

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

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

Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim.

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.

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.