The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are full of doubts.

We’re so saturated with propaganda every way you look that we don’t notice it. But when it isn’t there, you notice.

The scene beyond was eerie – a tortured jungle of torn pipes and jagged twisted-metal sculptures rearing up out of nightmare chasms of shadow being cast by a few emergency lamps glowing dull red to preserve night vision. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she made out several shadowy helmeted figures crouching over weapons in the darker recesses and behind makeshift parapets of smashed machines and crumpled wreckage.

In many ways, communications networks are like road systems: their purpose is to move traffic quickly from one place to another with minimum congestion. They therefore present similar problems to their designers. Speed is important, of course, and so is safety, which means essentially the same in communications as it does on highways: what arrives at a destination should bear as close a resemblance as possible to whatever left the departure point.

People don’t like seeing being afraid to express an opinion and seeing their neighbors dragged away to prison camps. You’d think that would be obvious enough, wouldn’t you? But governments – here, anyway – have always seemed unable grasp it. That’s what happens when you can’t see further than short-term expediency.

Kids don’t have ruts yet that adults have carved into their minds. They’re born logical. Crooked thinking has to be taught.

The fact that some religious fanatics might support a theory doesn’t invalidate it, anymore than the concurrence of UFO abduction cults invalidates the notion of extra-terrestrial life.

On Earth they’ve forgotten how to make everything except money. But what good is it, if there’s nothing worthwhile left to buy?

Sane, normal people don’t need power trips. So the lunatics end up in charge of everything.

Success is like a fart – only your own smells nice.