“Celibacy is the Tesla family secret, passed down through thegenerations.”“Celibacy, passed down through the generations?”Victor asked dryly.I flushed. “Its efficacy is not disproved by its imperfect application,”I muttered.”

“Tesla,” the vicar mused. “That’s a foreign name, is it not? Hungarian,is it?”“Serbian,” I corrected him. “I’m afraid the ——shire Teslas are ascant three centuries in these parts, having constructed Tesla Hall inthe reign of Queen Elizabeth.We are a restless people, and no doubtwill be moving on again any century now.”

“I am certainyou are not one of those dreary fellows one reads of who demands thattheir lady friends be in possession of a maidenhead. Mine was takenby a marrow two years ago.”“A marrow, Miss Pertwee? The vegetable that the Italians call ilzucchine?”“The very same.A most particularly bold and impetuous hot-housemarrow. It was quite the ravishment, I can assure you.”“I consider it no dishonor at all to be preceded by so noble a vegetable.”

“A lesser man might have begrudgedhim that, but remembering the old adage, "The finder’s goods shallhe retain / Nor mind the loser’s dreadful pain," I rejoiced, rather, in his goodfortune.”

“Perhaps if you were to refrain from deploying the phrase ‘ignorantbuffoon’ with a liberality most writers reserve for ‘it’ and ‘the,’you would find a readier audience.”

“It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! [...] Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence — by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle." – Nikola Tesla (at the end of his dream for Wardenclyffe)”

“The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains.”