In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped… - Neal Stephenson

"The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code — but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."
"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."
"Yes. Some of them never challenge it — they grow up to be small minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel — as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."
"Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"
"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded — they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."

Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.

The quill swirled and lunged over the page, in a slow but relentless three steps forward, two steps back sort of process and finally came to a full stop in a tiny pool of its own ink. Then, Louis Phelypeaux, First Compte de Pontchartrain, raised the nib, let it hover for an instant, as if gathering his forces, and hurled it backwards along the sentence, tiptoeing over “i’s” and slashing through “t’s” and “x’s” nearly tripping over an umlaut, building speed and confidence while veering through a slalom course of acute and grave accents, pirouetting through cedillas and carving vicious snap-turns through circumflexes. It was like watching the world’s greatest fencing master dispatch twenty opponents with a single continuous series of maneuvers.