"It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee."

“Darvin listened to the hymn with a mixture of enjoyment of its beauty and disdain of its content.”

“… a faded black T-shirt with a soaring penguin and the slogan 'Where do you want to come from today?'" – Newton's Wake”

“Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear *fucking* weapons." – USENET posting to rec.sf.arts.fandom 28 September 2000, in the discussion of Robert A. Heinlein's quote "The cowards never started and the weaklings died on the way.”

“It saddened him that military technology was so much more advanced than he’d ever imagined.”

“For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.”

“: "It shows them as weak, alienated individuals being recruited by the classic methods of any campus cult. Young men without a strong sense of self are a Microsoft for mind viruses, and these were no exception." weblog post, 3 September 2004”