I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy. - Robert Silverberg

Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject.

My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles.

“I’m asking you to do an unpleasant thing for a decent motive. You don’t want to do it, and I understand how you feel, but I’m trying to get you to see that your personal moral code isn’t always the highest factor. In wartime, a soldier shoots to kill because the universe imposes that situation on him. It may be an unjust war, and that might be his brother in the ship he’s aiming at, but the war is real and he has his role.”
“Where’s the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?”
“There isn’t any. That’s why I say the universe stinks.”
“We have no freedom at all?”
“The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.”
“Have you felt this way all your life?”
“Most of it,” Boardman said.
“When you were my age?”
“Even earlier.”