"The bureaucrat was sensitive to this kind of friction. It arose wherever the moving edge of technology control touched on local pride."

“The authority of superior knowledge was different in kind from the authority of assumed power. Still, he felt a little awkward assuming it.”

“The universe has backed you into another corner—you can kill or die. There are no other choices. Doesn’t that make you angry? Doesn’t it make you want revenge? Or are you going to truckle to Dame Fate one more time, to be crushed and for all I know resurrected to run the maze of torment again and yet again? Stand up on your hind legs for once!”

“He had for many years thought of Christ as a rival in greatness. Now he realized they were both brothers in misery. Their enemies were identical: the howling mob, the fearful, the inferior, the baying hounds of conventional morality.”

“This was human glory—a sad and exhaust-darkened memorial for good citizens to ignore and drunks to piss upon on their way home from the brothels. Here was the omega-point of all ambition.”

“For all that she’d had no great expectations for it, sex was turning out to be even more squalid, tawdry, and cynical than she had suspected it would.”

“Everyone dies—the rearrangement of when is a matter of only statistical interest.”