Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker.

tact and restraint all well and good in small talk, but one mustn’t beat around any bush where music is concerned.

confinement!” He bear-hugged me several degrees tighter

Corpocracy is built on slavery, whether or not the word is sanctioned.

perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.

Prejudice is permafrost.

Genius is not a word to bandy so casually, I suggested.

If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

How the consumers seethed to buy, buy, buy! Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.

Smart’n’Civ’lize ain’t nothin’ to do with the color o’ the skin, nay.

People b’lief the world is built so an’ tellin ’em it ain’t so caves the roofs on their heads’n’maybe yours.

“One day” was only a flea o’ hope for us.

“A Soul’s value is the dollars therein.”

Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

But no crisis is insuperable if people cooperate.

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.

You’ve described not “business” but…industrialized evil! You underestimate humanity’s ability to bring such evil into being.

Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion.

How lazily “xperts” dismiss what they fail to understand!

Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.

Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.

This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today.

“Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate

The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will.

Because a man like me has no business with this substance “beauty,” yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.

now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework.

That’s what all beliefs turn to one day. Rats’ nests & rubble.”

Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their graves in order to take their land & its riches? Wolves don’t sit in their caves, concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep!

As with cooks, doctors, notaries, clergymen, captains & kings, might evangelists also not be some good, some bad?

Cruelty has never made me smile.

one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.