"It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it."

“The first rule of space travel...is that mistakes are fatal. Space isn’t friendly; it kills you. And there are no second chances.”

“Along the way she’d acquired a powerful conviction that history was a series of accidents—God was either absent or playing a very elaborate practical joke —and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.”

“Yup, that pretty much confirms the diagnosis. This is the desk of a diseased mind, hugely ambitious, prone to taking insanely dangerous risks. He’s not ashamed of boasting about it—he clearly believes in better alpha-primate dominance displays through carpentry.”

“One of the great besetting problems of the modern age is what to do with too much information.”

“It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause.”

“People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions.”