“All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.” - Robert Silverberg

There’s no use trying to kid myself with cheery little uplifting cliches. I’ve been forced right up against the underlying truth of things. What a dark and cruel place the world is, for all its beauty, for all its wonder! We have miracles around us on every side—a spiderweb is a miracle, Lora!—but we also have violence, insanity, terrible disease, sudden death. The same Nature that brings us the mountains and the rivers and the green glistening meadows brings us the hurricane, the earthquake, the flood of red-hot lava rolling toward the city.

He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer.

Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.