It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline.

There were two ways of looking at the world, but only one when you are starving.

Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.")

but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?

You will have to look a long way before you find a bunch of scum-suckers more greedy, humourless and deserving of death than the suits in the music business.

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.