“People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.”

“Perhaps it was the 'sir's' that turned the trick. At their first meeting it was Mr. Woodrow, or when they felt bold, Sandy. Now it was sir, advising Woodrow that these two junior police officers were not his colleagues, not his friends, but lower-class outsiders poking their noses into the exclusive club that had given him standing and protection these seventeen years.”

“You're history, Donohue. You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It's 'God save our multinational' they're singing these days.”

“Waking and sleeping she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambition and her humanity”

“What did theories matter any more? She wanted to say. The rats have taken over the ship, it's often as simple as that; the rest is narcissistic crap. It must be. (...) For exploitation read property and you have the whole bit. First the exploiter hits the wage-slave over the head with his superior wealth; then he brainwashes him into believing that the pursuit of property is a valid motive for breaking him at the grindstone. That way he has him hooked twice over. (...) "You disappoint me, Charlie. All of a sudden you lack consistency. You've made the perceptions. Why don't you go out and do something about them? Why do you appear here one minute as an intellectual who has the eye and brain to see what is not visible to the deluded masses, the next you have not the courage to go out and perform a small service - like theft - like murder - like blowing something up - say, a police station - for the benefit of those whose hearts and minds are enslaved by the capitalist overlords? Come on, Charlie, where's the action? You're the free soul around here. Don't give us the words, give us the deeds." (...) Anger suspended her bewilderment and dulled the pain of her disgrace (...) She wished terribly that she could go mad so that everyone would be sorry for her; she wished she was just a raving lunatic waiting to be let off, not a stupid little fool of a radical actress (...) (part I, chapter 7)”

“...what woman has ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.”

“The Armorys of this world don't steal. They serve their country right or wrong. Or they do until the day when they come face to face with real life and their warped rectitude deserts them and their faces unlock and become real, puzzled faces like everybody else's. So there's another god for you that's passed its sell-by date: enlightened patriotism, until this afternoon Nick Armory's religion. (ch. 14)”