“Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.”

“Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)”

“I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.I am descended from you, and exist in your future.Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.”

“To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?”

“Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”

“The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?”