There was no one as good as he at using the ovens of logic to bake agreeable results. - William T. Vollmann

In those days you had to be careful what you thought, because your thoughts would come true. Nowadays you have to be careful what you think because if you think it, it will never happen.

What unlikely things we are, of course, with our voluntary locomotions, and our body heat which keeps our fat from congealing until death! — and how natural the inevitable downward course! (For it seems a wonder that our fleshly contraptions can endure an hour). — How natural, then, the Zombie.
[“The Blue Yonder”]

But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first memorized the proper antenna-vibration and foreleg-tap which the ants themselves used to request food. The poor workers, busy going here and there and back again all day and never getting a chance to think, automatically assumed that these fearsome strangers had been authorized by the Central Committee since they knew the password, and so they regurgitated a drop or two of fruit juice on cue, much the same as when one is traveling across Europe or Asia on the train and a person in uniform requests one’s passport, one’s ticket, takes them away, and comes back, or else does not come back, having sold them; a badge and a superior manner can obtain anything in this world.