So what shape was the world in this morning? Even flatter than yesterday. - John Brunner

I marvel’d how Man, by his GOD-sent wit,
Thus tam’d the salamander Element
And loos’d the Metal in the mountain pent
To make us Saws, and Shears, and useful Plows,
Swords for our hands, and Helmets for our brows,
The surgeon’s Scalpel, vehicle of Health,
And all our humble Tools for gaining wealth . . . ”De Arte Munificente,” Seventeenth century

I like you very much as a person,” he said […] “I think I’m going to like you just as much as a woman.”
“I hope so,” she answered with equal formality. “We may have to go a lot of places together.

The man had declared, with some justification, that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and then gone on to claim that the only solution lay in returning to the Good Old Moral Values of the glorious past.
Unable to stand any more, Malcolm had demanded why, if those values were so marvellous, the people who paid lip-service to them had involved mankind in two world wars with all their accoutrements from poison gas to atom-bombs.