In the next meeting they were arguing about the limits to tolerance, the things that simply wouldn’t be allowed no matter what religious meaning anyo… - Kim Stanley Robinson

And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in the open sun of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing and able to do the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops, and if every lab and every specialization had its politics, that was just politics; and in the end politics could not materially affect the structure itself, the mathematical edifice of their understanding of the phenomenal world.

It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

“Bah. Irrelevant. Physical reality is clearly not a factor in these calculations.”
“Well put.”
Sax shook his head, frustrated. “Religion again. Or ideology. What was it Frank used to say? An imaginary relationship to a real situation?”