It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the low… - Stephen Baxter

Try to remember this lesson. It might keep you alive a little longer. The most precious thing to a human being is a mind-set: more precious than one’s own life, even. Human history has taught us that lesson time and again, with its endless parade of wars—human sacrifices en masse—thousands of deaths over the most trivial of differences of religious interpretation.

Everyone was used to official manipulation of the truth—to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went.

It was a ploy, Jaar. I was trying to manipulate you, to get you to fight, to make you do what I wanted you to do."
"I know that." He smiled. "Of course I know that. But the motives behind your words don't reduce their truth. Don't you see that?