"Our representative government now is perhaps more representative than it has ever been before in history. It is not necessarily representative per capita, but it most surely is ad valorem. If you like philosophical problems. Here is one for you: should each human being’s vote register alike, as the lawbooks pretend and as some say the founders of our nation desired? Or should a vote be weighted according to the wisdom, the power, and the influence—that is, the money—of the voter?"

“The Way the Future Blogs, Pohl's blog”

“He drew himself up and said with dignity: “We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: ‘Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.’”

“What helped most of all was the utter joy Cornut took in it all. It was, after all, his life. As he led the class, he felt again the wonder he himself had felt, sitting in a class like this one. He hardly heard the buzz from the class as he put his pointer down to gesture, and blindly picked it up again, still talking. Teaching mathematics was a kind of hypnosis for him, an intense, gut-wrenching absorption that had gripped him from the time of his first math class.”

“It is not true that girls are made of sugar and spice. These mysterious creatures, enameled of complexion, faintly scented with distant flower-fields and musk, constricted here and enlarged there – they are animals, as men are animals, sustained by the same sludgy trickle of partly fermented organic matter; and indeed with a host of earthy problems men need never know, the oestral flow, the burgeoning cells that replenish the race. Womanhood has always been a triumph of artifice over the animal within.”

“Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes.”

“Specialization is the goal of civilization.”