“You speak very generally,” Valentine said. “I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly. - Robert Silverberg

The thing about aliens is that they tend to be so alien.

Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.

In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.