1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.

But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.”“You don’t seem to agree.”“I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understandinghow truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.

Nobody can work with the poor and not fall over Karl Marx from time to time — or just fall over the Bible, as far as that goes.