You know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it in. - Brian Aldiss

Only a technological age could condemn unborn generations to exist in it, as if man were mere protoplasm, without emotion or aspiration.

-Expansion to your ego, friend.
-At your expense.

These people, scattered all over the country, a few of them on the continent, were much like normal people. To outsiders, their relationship was not apparent; they certainly never revealed it; they never met. They became traders, captains of ships that traded with the Indies, soldiers, parliamentarians, agriculturists; some plunged into, some avoided, the constitutional struggles that dogged most of the seventeenth century. But they were all — male or female — Franks. They had the inexpressible benefit of their progenitor's one hundred and seventy-odd years' experience, and not only of his, but of all the other Franks. It was small wonder that, with few exceptions, whatever they did they prospered.