I tell you, lad, that men will believe is one says, "The Gods say..." They will believe if one says, "I had a Vision..." They will believe if one says, "It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold..." But, if one says, "History teaches," then they will not believe.

I'm not sure a world run by women would be any better. They're human beings!

The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along.

Men like to think well of themselves, and poets help them do it.

I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.

Other people's risks are statistical. When it's your risk, your own child, it isn't statistical anymore.

The Regime has become so smug it can't tell the difference among the revolutionary, the innovative, or the merely various. The high command knows so little about the outside that if I came back with a fully equipped chemical laboratory and told them I'd found it in a cave, they'd probably believe that, so long as I brought it back piecemeal in my saddle bags, thus proving I hadn't known it was there beforehand.