“People will always go. Always. They always believe the can make a better life than in the old world. What the hell, maybe they can.”

“Will people really go?” “People always go. Always. They always believe they can make a better life than in the old world.”

“You killed more people than anybody in history.""Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.”

“This is the Speaker for the Dead? Judging someone by appearances?" "Maybe I've fallen in love with Grego." "You've always been a sucker for people who pee on you.”

“He knew he could always be smart later, if that turned out to be a better strategy. But once you admitted to being smart, there was no going back.”

“She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.”

“But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.”