“If you haven't considered it already, consider it now: there is every possibility that some of us, or all of us, may live and triumph, only to stand trial for murder.”

“If Koboi defeats and presumably murders us both then you can consider the debt null and void.”

“Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?”

“True. The one certainty about riding, Braygan, is that - at some time - you will fall off. It is a fact. Another fact you might like to consider, in your life of perpetual terror, is that you will die. We are all going to die, some of us young, some of us old, some of us in our sleep, some of us screaming in agony. We cannot stop it, we can only delay it.”

“For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.”

“Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities.”