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“Not handicapped—handi-capable.”
Denial is always a bear trap—you’ll forget about it and step in it later.
Not that I wanted to lose my edge, either, because the damage I owned also made me the kind of fighter that had brought me to the attention of Church. It left me with a useful kind of scar tissue, a quality that gives me an edge in a fight, especially when the fight comes out of nowhere.
You see, we don’t always get to pick our battles. We don’t often get to choose the rules of engagement. Sometimes a nasty bit of violence comes at us out of the blue, and it’s not always of our making. We neither ask for it nor subscribe to it, but life won’t ask you if it’s fair or if you’re ready.
“There was wild science-fiction stuff going on back then. Z1, the first binary computer, was developed by Konrad Zuse in Berlin in 1936, and his Z3, developed in 1941, was the first computer controlled by software. People today seem to think computers started with the PC.”
“We pay the Ferryman with the Devil’s coin,”
Most people—in Germany as in every other country—are easily led, and easily corrupted by an extreme few. We’ve seen that with Muslim terrorists.
Here’s a tip: never grab a good fighter with both hands, because he can hit back and you can’t block.
What drives a man like Cyrus Jakoby to keep such an inhuman program going? The technology in this room demonstrated spoke of enormous intelligence, imagination, and drive.
My personal politics are left of center, but I have my hardline moments. A guy like Jakoby, a man willing to slaughter every nonwhite in Africa … I hate to know this about myself, but I know that if I was alone in a room with that bastard I don’t think I’d be Mr. Passive. If I could make it last for a year, keeping him in screaming agony, would that offer an adequate redress? When the crime is so vast that it spans decades of time, crosses all national lines, changes cultures, and devours the weak and strong alike, then what possible form of punishment could be appropriate? Where is justice in
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“The value of choice is not in the size of the action but in its effect.
“Why do we hate?” “I don’t know. There are long and short answers to that. Mostly people hate because people are different from them, or because they’re the same. It comes down to fear. Our species has always been motivated by fear. We fear what we don’t know or understand, we fear differences, and the primitive in our consciousness demonstrates fear through violence. It’s what makes us so aggressive. Fear, and greed.”
