On the contrary, Mr. Wiggin. The tax laws are designed to trick people into paying more than they have to. That way the rich who are in the know get to take advantage of drastic tax breaks, while those who don’t have such good connections and haven’t yet found an accountant who does are tricked into paying ludicrously higher amounts. I, however, know all the tricks.

Your pain pained me.

If I am just as stupid when I am twenty as I was when I was two, if I am just as stupid when I am a hundred as I was when I was fifty, then I am not doing my job. I am occupying space and time to no purpose, and I might just as well have been a lump of rock.

There are other themes for poetry besides immersion in the Will, my friends. The love of person for person, the joy of defending one’s home, the wonder of standing naked beneath the fiery stars – ” The invader laughed. “Can it be that Earth fell so swiftly because its only poets were poets of acquiescence to destiny?

Earth fell,” said the Surgeon, “because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it.

Part of the prejudice thing is that the victim has to be somebody weaker than you in numbers, but somebody you secretly admire or fear.

He was looking for a vehicle of purpose, for a vessel to contain his formless ambitions and abilities.

Know this, and know it well: time is never wasted. Wherever we go, whatever we do, everything is an aspect of education. Even when we don’t immediately grasp the lesson.

It’s a cultural matter. They take pride in their unpride. It reflects their lack of status. Bottom... of the bottom of the human world, and they know it, and they don’t like it, and the squalor is like a badge of nonstatus for them. Saying, you want us to be filth, we’ll live in filth too. Reveling in it. Wallowing in it. If we’re not people, we don’t have to be tidy...

When you enslave a black man, you enslave yourself as well, for now you are bound to him as surely as he is bound to you, and your character is shaped by his bondage as surely as his own is. Make the black man servile, and in the same process you make yourself tyrannical. Make the black man quiver in fear before you, and you make yourself a monster of terror.