"I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly."

“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.”