"...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust."

“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”

“Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborate a pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics.”

“It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.”

“For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them—if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful.”

“People in the streets, that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha!”

“The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.”