Technical people don’t make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind – but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all – no one’s around to write horror stories.

Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there’s always the chance it may use its position to...

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

We’re endangered by our own success.

All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of...

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

Les enfants sont des créatures extraordinaires, quand ils ne sont pas simplement chiants.

Tycoon had a peddler’s talent for using words to redefine reality.

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I’ll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for.

You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can’t feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.