“Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.”

This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.

The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.

The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.

And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.

I write with teenagers in mind.

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.

I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name.

Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence.

We need practice solving problems.

Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

Everybody just needs to realize that when you write something you’re just in one mood. I was told I needed to write it and it was overdue; I don’t even remember what day it was.

Now in these troubled times, even more than ever, we need an affirmation that there is goodness and beauty in the world.

Dictatorships by their nature are unrepresentative as they neglect the social needs of the people.

To be good, you need to believe in what you’re doing.

We are all capable of change and growth; we just need to know where to begin.

Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have on things we do not need?