You will have useful work: the destruction of evil men. What work could be more useful? - Jack Vance

So much existed: so much to be felt and seen and known! A single life was not enough…

Humanity is old, civilization is new: the mesh of cogs is by no means smooth—and this is as it should be. Never should a man enter a building of glass or metal, or a spaceship, or a submarine, without a small shock of astonishment; never should he avoid an act of passion without a small sense of effort....We of the Institute receive an intensive historical inculcation; we know the men of the past, and we have projected dozens of possible future variations, which, without exception, are repulsive. Man, as he exists now, with all his faults and vices, a thousand gloriously irrational compromises between two thousand sterile absolute—is optimal. Or so it seems to us who are men.

She watched with an expression—quizzical, unhuman. Mario wondered, how can beauty be refined to such to such reckless heights, and still be so cold and friendless? If she were wounded, would she bleed?