They Speak Very Well Of You". -

Oh, They Never Lie. They Dissemble, Evade, Prevaricate, Confound, Confuse, Distract, Obscure, Subtly Misrepresent And Willfully Misunderstand With What Often Appears To Be A Positively Gleeful Relish And Are Generally Perfectly Capable Of Contriving To Give One An Utterly Unambiguous Impression Of Their Future Course Of Action While In Fact Intending To Do Exactly The Opposite, But They Never Lie. Perish The Thought.

I Still Have Some Of My Old University Essays, And I Do Still Have My Drawing Book From Primary Year Seven.

The Point Is, There Is No Feasible Excuse For What Are, For What We Have Made Of Ourselves. We Have Chosen To Put Profits Before People, Money Before Morality, Dividends Before Decency, Fanaticism Before Fairness, And Our Own Trivial Comforts Before The Unspeakable Agonies Of Others

"i Think I Know The Real Reason." "which Is?" "alcohol In The Dust Clouds. Goddamn Stuff Is Everywhere. Any Lousy Species Ever Invents The Telescope And The Spectroscope And Starts Looking In Between The Stars, What Do They Find?" He Knocked The Glass On The Table. "loads Of Stuff, But Much Of It Alcohol." He Drank From The Glass. "humanoids Are The Galaxy's Way Of Trying To Get Rid Of All That Alcohol."

It Was A Truism That All Civilizations Were Basically Neurotic Until They Made Contact With Everybody Else And Found Their Place Within The Ever-changing Meta-civilisation Of Other Beings, Because, Until Then, During The Stage When They Honestly Believed They Might Be Entirely Alone In Existence, All Solo Societies Were Possessed Of Both An Inflated Sense Of Their Own Importance And A Kind Of Existential Terror At The Sheer Scale And Apparent Emptiness Of The Universe.