Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

You can’t go around interfering with Individualism with impunity.

Being in love feels terrible.

the only standards of the television industry were monetary, that there was no real motive in television beyond the making of money.

If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living.

I am not certain I like the idea of ‘great men’; it makes me uncomfortable. ‘Great men’ often have had very bloody plans for mankind.

Bribes were paid to city managers to tear up the streetcar tracks, and advertisements were bought in newspapers to convince the public that it should be done. So more cars could be sold, and more oil would be made into gasoline, to be burned in the cars. So that corporations could grow, and so a few people could become incredibly rich, and have servants, and live in mansions.

Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.

Robots were something invented once out of a blind love for the technology that could allow them to be invented.