We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships… - John Brunner

intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same.

Donald was stunned. They must be making a sensaysh out of it, to sacrifice so much time from even their ten-minute condensed-news cycle!
His Mark II confidence evaporated. Euphoric from his recent eptification, he had thought he was a new person, immeasurably better equipped to affect the world. But the implications of that expensive plug stabbed deep into his mind. If State were willing to go to these lengths to maintain his cover identity, that meant he was only the visible tip of a scheme involving perhaps thousands of people. State just didn’t issue fiats to a powerful corporation like English Language Relay Satellite Service without good reason.
Meaningless phrases drifted up, dissociated, and presented themselves to his awareness, all seeming to have relevance to his situation and yet not cohering.
My name is Legion.
I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.
The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.
Say can you look into the seeds of time?
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Struggling to make sense of these fragments, he finally arrived at what his subconscious might be trying to convey.
The prize, these days, is not in finding a beautiful mistress. It’s in having presentable prodgies. Helen the unattainable is in the womb, and every mother dreams of bearing her. Now her whereabouts is known. She lives in Yatakang and I’ve been sent in search of her, ordered to bring her back or say her beauty is a lie — if necessary to make it a lie, with vitriol. Odysseus the cunning lurked inside the belly of the horse and the Trojans breached the wall and took it in while Laocoön and his sons were killed by snakes. A snake is cramped around my forehead and if it squeezes any tighter it will crack my skull.
When the purser next passed, he said, “Get me something for a headache, will you?”
He knew that was the right medicine to ask for, yet it also seemed he should have asked for a cure for bellyache, because

Most of them seem to be at it in the roof-garden. Want to go and watch,get some pressure up for later?”
“I think these cigarettes are horrible. Made my throat so sore. And my guts are all sour and nasty. Did people really use twenty in a day?”
“They call it streamlining, of course, but what it comes down to is they’re undermining my responsibility in the firm and I’m going to fight tooth and claw to hang on to what I’ve got. If I have to play it dirty that’ll be their fault, not mine.”
“It makes genuine three-dimensional poetry possible for the first time in history. Right now he’s experimenting with motion added, and some of the things he’s turned out are hair-raising.”
“You hold the knife this way, see?”
“Refuse to teach their children to read and write, say it handicaps them for the post-Gutenberg era.”
“Not many people have spotted it but there’s a loophole in the Maryland eugenics law.”
“A polyformer for water-sculpture, quite new.”
“Of course I don’t love Henry the way I love you but the shrinker did tell me I ought to occasionally.”
“I’m just cutting jets for a prayer or two but I’ll be back — don’t get involved with anyone else.”
“That makes seventeen different mixtures I’ve tried, and I’d better have some antalc, right away.”
“I think it was bitchy not to tell Miriam it was pig-meat.