She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.

Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.

In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?

You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, traveling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abscesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say "yes."

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.

I don't read an awful lot of fiction and when I do, it tends to be lightweight stuff.

Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should.