"Is it not unsettling to consider the blind unlikelihoods that shape one’s fate?"

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”