One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself. - Kim Stanley Robinson

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

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

What kind of story am I going to give them next? Because that's what we are to other people, boy, we are their gossip. That's all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip. And so I could be the story of the man who rode high and fell hard, and had his spirit broken and crawled off into a hole like a dog, to die as soon as he could manage it. Or I could be the story of a man who rode high and fell hard, and then got up defiant, and walked away in a new direction.