“We won’t necessarily become extinct. Disarmament is being negotiated. Not all of us are insane.” “But most of you are. Enough of you are—it only req… - Walter Tevis

One of my books says that at times men have worshiped the ocean as a god. I can understand that easily. Yes.
But the Baleens would never have understood such a thing; they would have called the idea “blasphemy.” The God they worship is an abstract and ferociously moral thing, like a computer. And the compelling, mystical rabbi, Jesus, they have turned into some kind of moral Detector. I want none of that, and none of the Jehovah of the Book of Job, either.

And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, in what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it.

"What is it exactly that you do with a book?"
"You read it."
"Oh," she said. And then, "What does read mean?"
I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, "Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently."