“The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone possibly have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy?”

“No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing.Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.”

“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”

“The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with with words and ideas instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions.”

“Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic.”

“That idea would be embarrassing because there is something excessive about it, it would take to much energy to defend (while the best possible progressive idea, so to speak, defends itself)...”