Good luck to you, too, sir." "I make it a point not to know the lady," said Cletus. "I can't afford to count on her. - Gordon R. Dickson

With the situation fully and correctly understood, it becomes entirely reasonable that the very small fraction of a second preceding a violent death could be a trigger to speculative thought.

The original role of the machine started to get perverted around the time of the industrial revolution. It came to be regarded not as a means to a desired end, but as part of the end in itself. The process accelerated in the nineteenth century, and exploded in the twentieth. Man kept demanding more in the way of service from his technology, and the technology kept giving it—but always at the price of a little more of man’s individual self-contained powers. In the end—in our time—our technology has become second thing to a religion. Now we’re trapped in it. And we’re so enfeebled by our entrapment that we tell ourselves it’s the only possible way to live. That no other way exists.

It's not often I make mistakes," he said. "Perhaps I can console myself with the thought that when I do they turn out to be on the same order of magnitude as my successes.