“Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done.. almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world.. or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.”

“Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved; and it is to this world that he returns, incessantly, though he may pass through and seem to inhabit a world quite foreign to it.”

“This man has conquered the world! What have you done?"The philosopher replied without an instant's hesitation, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

“It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.”

“In today's world if we do what we've always done, we will NOT get what we've always gotten.”

“But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics.”