Anytime you have to threaten people to get them to laugh at your joke you have to consider it less than successful, okay? - Kim Stanley Robinson

It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos—idiots, in short. But useful idiots.

Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them.