When he left Quincys he returned to the studios and went to see the ma — Tom Holt

"It may not be true, but it provides a much-needed focal point for baffled indignation."

"Why get so worked up about a nonexistent threat? Answer: someone somewhere is covering something up."

"The knight raises both eyebrows, like someone by Burne-Jones whos just trodden on something sharp. I am Prince Boamund, eldest son of King - Boamund? Thats right, says the knight, Boamund, eldest son of - How do you spell that? Boamund looks worried. Where he comes from you can take advanced falconry, or you can take spelling; not both. Guess which one he opted for. - c. 1"

"He knew of course that there was such a thing as love, and that if you happen to come across it, as most people seem to do, it is not a thing that you can avoid, or that you should want to avoid. But you cannot go out and find it, because it is not that sort of creature. The phrase “to fall in love,” he realized, is a singularly apt one; it is something you blunder into, like a pothole. Very like a pothole."

"“So youve never had any urge to rule the world, or anything like that?” “What, me?” Vanderdecker said. “No, I cant say I have. It would be nice to change some things, naturally.” Jane leaned forward and looked serious. “Such as?” Vanderdecker considered. “I dont know,” he said, “now you come to mention it. I cant actually think of anything that even remotely matters. You get such a wonderful sense of perspective at my age.”"

"“It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this. “The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium.”"

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"