“If the radical right had its way we’d all be church-going polyester heterosexuals driving around in white Cadillacs eating meatloaf and wax beans while mammoth bulldozers leveled all our forests and even hummingbirds were extinct.”

“If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will be as a signal that maybe, just maybe, people power can still beat the money power. That senators aren't just extensions of parties and presidents, and that politics can be about something more than Democratic toothpaste versus Republican toothpaste.”

“Listen cousin, the way things are supposed to work out, one day the struggles of all you screwed up little underdogs will forge a permanent rainbow that'll encircle this entire earth, I should live so long.”

“In the heart of the slaughterhouse -- always -- enough room to nourish the awe.”

“Each person leaves a legacy--a single, small piece of herself, which makes richer each individual life and the collective life of humanity as a whole. But do not despair, for despair is a despicable and bourgeois affectation; we must not allow it. As for what happens next, well, as the Cuban poet Regino Pedroso once said, "como forjamos el hierro, forjaremos días nuevos": as we hammer out iron, we shall hammer out new days.”

“Sooner or later Cleofes is gonna get it.”

“Standing there, peering around his room, Pete realized something that should have dawned on him years ago: Science really did suck. (Russell was right.) There just wasn’t any point to it. Sure, in its most altruistic distillation, science saved lives—but when had it ever made those lives worth living? The cold machine called science’s sole purpose, and Pete knew it now, was to drain the wonder out of things, to sap the imagination of its juices, to rob possibilities from dreamers. Science explained without ever getting to the crux of the matter, locking us all into a single paradigm of thought: that all we are is randomly accumulated stardust hanging out on a larger clump of randomly accumulated stardust that is spiraling out and away from other chunks of randomly accumulated stardust, on a collision course with an empty infinity.”