“Better to go out to see the world one time with his own eyes, than to be burned alive with the plastic curtains.”

“And now you see why some facts, some pieces of knowledge, have to be snuffed out as soon as they form. Curiosity would blow across such embers and burn this silo to the ground.”

“He could imagine how nice it would be to not understand. To see one's microcosm as the macrocosm. To focus a meter beyond one's own nose.”

“He nearly tripped and fell down the last few steps, his legs not used to an end to the descent, a flat piece of ground rather than one more tread to sink to.”

“That word means something else, you know,' his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. 'It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started.”

“Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made—the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.”He spread his hands apart like an explosion going off.“When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him.”

“....faking his real life so he can live his fake one.”