But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science. - Kim Stanley Robinson

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

There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.

She was beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Event would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now.