Michael was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around. - Kim Stanley Robinson

It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking—an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.