Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other … - Fredric Brown

Her life, except for reading, had been dull—but it had not been in vain.

“Please concentrate on how the system is governed.”
Crag let his mind think about the two parties—both equally crooked and corrupt—that ran the planets between them, mostly by cynical horse trading methods that betrayed the common people on both sides. The Guilds and the Syndicates—popularly known as the Guilds and the Gildeds—one purporting to represent capital and the other purporting to represent labor, but actually betraying it at every opportunity. Both parties getting together to rig elections so they might win alternately and preserve an outward appearance of a balance of power and a democratic government. Justice, if any, obtainable only by bribery. Objectors or would-be reformers—and there weren’t many of either—eliminated by the hired thugs and assassins both parties used. Strict censorship of newspapers, radio and television, extending even to novels lest a writer attempt to slip in a phrase that might imply that the government under which he lived was less than perfect.

"Nuts," said the Martian. "You people got rocks in your heads, that's what accounts for your superstitions."