The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.

He was currently wondering vaguely who Moey and Chandon were.

People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant.

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?

I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.