The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.

Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love.