No step along the way had seemed more than a little thing; but altogether it came to something rather monstrous. - Kim Stanley Robinson

In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.

Michael was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around.

...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.