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The ending of human life used to be in the hands of nature. But we stole it. Now we have a monopoly on death. We are its sole distributor.
Death makes the whole world kin.
“But remember that good intentions pave many roads. Not all of them lead to hell.”
Like most everything else we do, education, from grade school through the highest of universities, is just a way to keep us busy.
The greatest achievement of the human race was not conquering death. It was ending government.
She doubted Rowan cried himself to sleep. He was the type of kid who kept his emotions very much to himself. She couldn’t read him. He was opaque, and it bothered her. Or perhaps he was so transparent, she was seeing through him to the other side. She couldn’t be sure.
No one rages against the system anymore. At most, they just glare at it a bit.
In fact, the more extreme Tonist groups actually blinded themselves, and the Thunderhead reluctantly allowed it, preventing their healing nanites from restoring sight. It was awful, and yet was one of the few expressions of religious freedom left in a world that had laid its various gods to rest.
Without the threat of suffering, we can’t experience true joy. The best we get is pleasantness.”
“The world has a talent for rewarding bad behavior with stardom,”
there are some who seek celebrity to change the world, and others who seek it to ensnare the world.
“We could have been called reapers,” Goddard said, “but our founders saw fit to call us scythes—because we are the weapons in mankind’s immortal hand.
