the ideas in the piece seemed to make such great sense. |
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest. |
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. |
This is a beguiling book, |
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. |
To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon. |
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. |
Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism; Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant; that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted. |
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. |
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. |
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. |
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say? |
You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell. |