I was having a mildly paranoid day, mostly due to the fact that the mad priest lady from over the river had taken to nailing weasels to my front door again.

There's one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it's one word long— PEOPLE. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It's people that kill every revolution.

Elijah Snow: 'Who have you pissed off this time, John?' John Stone: 'Sumatran robot death sluts -- Dammit, ONE of these buttons fires the atomic death biter --

The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.

I want vasopressin, washed caffeine, Jumpstart, ginkgo biloba, guarana, and any intelligence enhancer introduced in the last five years.

So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do?

Wolves ate even mighty hunters, for there was no honor or code among predators, and everyone's guts steam the same way when torn open on a cold night.