The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the di — James K. Morrow

"Be sure to convict that chucklehead. He thinks a country’s Christianity is measured by the size of its thermonuclear arsenal."

"“Are we innately aggressive?” asked Aquinas. “Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so—and I suspect that it is—then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands. The killer-ape hypothesis does not specify a fate—it lays out an agenda. Beware, the fable warns. Caution. Trouble ahead. Genocidal weapons in the hands of creatures who are bored by peace.” “I think I’m going to throw up,” said Brat. “But the fable went unheeded. And the weapons, unchecked. And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species—a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed—creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.”"

"My friends in the nouveau paganism camp accuse me of quaintness: Bible thumpers are straw men, so why bother?...My answer is that straw men, once set aflame with zeal, can be quite dangerous, and that the gap between New Age irrationalism and Christian fundamentalism is not nearly so wide as we might wish to believe."

"To George, Overwhite still seemed like a windbag, but he was obviously a resourceful and intelligent one, a windbag woven of the finest material."

"People found ever more ingenious ways to hate each other."

"Oh, Robespierre, Robespierre, was the triumph of inadvertence over intention ever so total?"