The sad truth, Afsan, is that often what we intend has little to do with what we achieve. - Robert J. Sawyer

It turned out that big-bucks science had been a purely mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, starting with the Manhattan Project and ending with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.

It embodies, perhaps more clearly than anything else I've written, the central theme of all my work: namely, that clearheaded, unflinching, rational thinking is the only effective way to deal with reality.