Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing. - Alastair Reynolds

It was the wrong approach. But it was the only way we—they—could see at the time. So we mustn’t mock them for their mistakes. In two hundred years, someone will be just as quick to mock us for ours, if we’re not careful.

Welcome to politics, Doctor. We don’t get to pick our allies. The best we can hope for is that we don’t despise them quite as much as our enemies.

Grafenwalder shoots a sidelong glance at Ursula Goodglass, wondering what their marriage must be like. Clearly sex isn’t in the cards, but he doubts that it was ever the main interest in their lives. Games, especially those of prestige and subterfuge, are amongst the chief entertainments of the Rust Belt moneyed.