It’s herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory.

A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.

No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.

The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.

The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.

Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way?

Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.

Fayez whistled low. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y’know, whatever.

I’m a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do.

You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.

You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.

A bunch of bad songs, make an awful whine.

We cannot look at Syria, and the evil that has arisen from the ashes of indecision, and think this is not the lowest point in the world's inability to protect and defend the innocent.

Equality of opportunity is freedom, but equality of outcome is repression.

Have you eaten?' I asked Diesel. When?' Recently.' No.

You can think about your career or you can think about your job. I like to think about my job.

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.

I never talk much about my family, but my grandfather was friendly with these guys, with magicians and ventriloquists on the highest levels, and I was just interested.

You will triumph, O Iraqis, and with you the sons of your Arab nation

I personally love books that make me think, so I naturally gravitate toward writing a book like that, one that's going to make someone think and make me think.

We're kind of defined by our mistakes