The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.

Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.

One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.

Who could not return from a visit to Jack Vance's world, without feeling that he had been somewhere unique, that he had experienced things unavailable in our mundane world?

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.