“Each one of us is the center of our own universe. That's the only way it can be. From our point of view, we are stationary and everything else is swirling around us, dropping into our lives just for our reaction.”

“You don't have time to chitty-chat with loose women. We have work to do. And you have to save humanity. That's a lot of shit to get done.”

“I will use my mind, not just my regular brain lobes.”

“Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us … that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.”

“Most of us have one BIG IDEA at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.”

“everything we own will one day belong to someone else, but everything we are, is ours forever.”

“We all, like Frodo, carry a Quest, a Task: our daily duties. They come to us, not from us. We are free only to accept or refuse our task- and, implicitly, our Taskmaster. None of us is a free creator or designer of his own life. "None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself" (Rom 14:7). Either God, or fate, or meaningless chance has laid upon each of us a Task, a Quest, which we would not have chosen for ourselves. We are all Hobbits who love our Shire, or security, our creature comforts, whether these are pipeweed, mushrooms, five meals a day, and local gossip, or Starbucks coffees, recreational sex, and politics. But something, some authority not named in The Lord of the Rings (but named in the Silmarillion), has decreed that a Quest should interrupt this delightful Epicurean garden and send us on an odyssey. We are plucked out of our Hobbit holes and plunked down onto a Road.”