"It is rather like politics or policing: those who most enjoy the work are often those who should not be doing it." Sheri S. Tepper, The Fresco

"...you old hippie, you got lucky and were born in the right little window and got to grab all the surplus of happiness that history ever produced, and you blew it, you stood around and did nothing while the right reaganed back into power and shut down all possibility of change for an entire generation, you blew it in a ten-year party and staggered off stoned and complicit. You neither learned to do machine politics nor dismantled the machine. Not one of you imagined what had to be done. And so the backlash came down, the reactionary power structure, stronger than ever." Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting

"...how, from earliest times, human beings have with "bewildering optimism" amassed collections of books and created buildings to put them in; how they have striven to assemble, encompass, and contain the materials on which the world's knowledge is recorded in the vain but determined hope that they will somehow, ultimately, be able to gather it all into one coherent, ordered space." Alice Crawford, The Meaning of the Library

"Freedom is the absence of unnecessary involuntary constraint." Zeno's Laughter

Ethnicity and nationality: "A creation of the human will, it is impervious to mere rational disproof." Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

"Do you think Pavlov thought about feeding his dog every time he heard a bell ring?" Jeremy Parish's nephew

"Science is a haphazard collection of institutions, norms, customs, and traditions that have developed by trial and error over the past several centuries." Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (2020)

"There was a span of years in the 1980s during which I marveled at the almost supernatural powers of Steve Perry. While he sang for Journey, he made people believe in themselves, weep over long distance relationships, and inquire at transit stations about midnight trains. Together with his bandmates, he fully explored the hidden depths and nuances of the word whoa -- teasing out shades of meaning and connotations that I would have been hard pressed to discover, even with two thousand years of attention to the problem – and I'm willing to bet that the pathos with which he imbued the syllable na shall never be equalled in the history of the human race." Kevin Hearne, Tricked

"...the appearance of intelligence does not always indicate its presence." -Zagoran, Talos Principle 2