Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway. - Iain Banks

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.

You been mud wrestling..?' 'Only with my conscience.' 'Really? Who won?' 'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve anything.

It was a truism that all civilisations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.