“the crushed carcasses of slugs and frogs mixing with the Cretaceous carbons of tar give the road an organic glaze.”

“There are a lot of dead carcasses on the road, and the vultures are out sniffing. This is the cycle of Wall Street. When bubbles crash, you get the value guys who come in and say, 'This thing is cheap.”

“That Mesozoic mama's boy wouldn't have lasted five seconds in the Cretaceous period.”

“Vilis still doesn't pass to me but I don't care. Where he comes from (Latvia) they burn black people into tar and make roads out of them.”

“Probably no single event highlights the strength of Campbell’s argument (on peak oil) better than the rapid development of the Alberta tar sands. Bitumen, the world’s ugliest and most expensive hydrocarbon, can never be a reasonable substitute for light oil due to its extreme capital, energy, and carbon intensity. Bitumen looks, smells, and behaves like asphalt; running an economy on it is akin to digging up our existing road infrastructure, melting it down, and enriching the goop with hydrogen until it becomes a sulfur-rich but marketable oil.”

“A great brain and a huge organization have been turnedto the extinction of one man. It is crushing the nut with thetriphammer--an absurd extravagance of energy--but the nut is veryeffectually crushed all the same.”