And wasn’tthat a common pattern in human history!Greedyreligious orders, wanting to keeppower for themselves, using customs and myth and threats and murder to keep the people in line and then making them believe it was all for their own good so they wouldn’t challenge the supremacy of the priesthood. Some political thinker of a few centuries ago had nailed it exactly: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”
Chapter 6 (p. 63)
Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as culturalrelativism.
Chapter 7 (p. 81)
How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all ofanthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?
Chapter 9 (p. 101)
A conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking.
An enormous amount ofbehavior grows out of genetic imperatives.
Chapter 3 (p. 38)
He introduced Marbet as “project psychologist.” “I don’t believe inpsychology,” Capelo said flatly. Marbet remain unruffled. “Even that based on physiology?” “If it’s based onchemistry, with replicable results from control experiments, then of course I believe in it. That’s science. Literary theories about themind are not.” “Ah,” Marbet said. “Fairy tales, all. From Uncle DroselmeyerFreud to Lady Godiva Jennings, undressing some poor sap’s mind ‘consciousness layer’ by ‘consciousness layer.’ All for a large amount of money, of course.”
Chapter 4 (p. 45)
Do you always interfere in other people’s confrontations? Are you that most dangerous of all people, a peace-at-any-price meddler?
Chapter 4 (p. 47)
That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing.
Chapter 11 (p. 131)
When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing.
Chapter 17 (p. 187)
In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one.
Every singlewar ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifyingdeebee programs. All it took were contacts and money.
Chapter 3 (p. 45)
Amanda decided that if these people wereGod’s choice for instruments, thenGod was as crazy as Father Emil.
Chapter 4 (p. 50)
She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking atself-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it tomadness.
Chapter 9 (p. 109)
Science should remain above politics, if it’s to do its job.
Chapter 18 (p. 200)
By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair. But he’d always known that was true of the universe.
Chapter 29 (p. 322)
Kaufman’s fault. He had not planned, had not seen far enough ahead. Failure of vision was a sin the universe did not forgive.
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