Politics may come and go, but trade goes on forever. - Vernor Vinge

Every state religion he’d ever seen had a core of hypocrisy. That was why he’d been against bringing “Hrala” ashore—he knew the priests would never accept their theology suddenly incarnate.

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for. From this era on, I think invention will be the parent of necessity—and not the other way around.