“Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience.”

“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.”

“Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.”

“Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot”

“People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.”

“It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.”

“There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?' He shook his head. 'Or slept with a man?' Another shake. 'I thought so,' Yay said. 'You're strange, Gurgeh.' She drained her glass.”