"I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish “explorers,” or in the specious “natural histories” compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener’s Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception."

“It’s always been an exceedingly curious thing to me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little island of time and place in the world.”

“It was more than sad, the eternal unteachability of youth.”

“Good soldiers stay alive by being unsentimental and having a quick eye for the main chance.”

“I have in mind the notion that is so fashionable nowadays, namely that we live in a Dark Age where puny Science quails before many a dim Unknown on every hand. Surely this sort of facile pessimism dampens the energy of inquiry even as it leads to obscurantism—toward a despair of certainty which encourages us to embrace truths, half-truths, and the most extravagant falsehoods with a promiscuous lack of discrimination.”

“And I make bold to say that I am not the only one of my countrymen who could profit from taking this admonition to heart.”

“The assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot.”