In the old words of wisdom, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough to get … - Charles Sheffield

The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go.

Everyone was somebody’s cousin, or uncle, or bedmate, or best college friend. Sometimes he felt that the whole of Washington was glued together into one vast, incestuous, and inefficient snotball.

See, everybody looks at the world from his own point of view. I call it the ground state of the resting mind. And your brain does the same thing, left alone it returns to and thinks about what it’s really interested in.