“More gold had been mined from the mind of men than the earth it self”
“The words of honorable men are more valuable than gold”
“So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)”
“Self-consciousness is, from a naturalistic point of view (in this case neurobiological), not more than a degree of sophistication of neural processes. The emergence of self-conscious states is not a drastic, extravagant, earth-shaking phenomenon.”
“No matter what you've been told, your worth more than gold.”
“Gold. You don’t mind if I just mined some, do you?”