“Sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn’t once entirely different from anything we remember, and we’ve forgotten that we forgot.”

“We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two.”

“If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.”

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

“Ghosts, I was thinking, memories—I wasn’t sure there was a difference.”

“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”

“We always think there are stories to do and we don’t think, ‘maybe this environment should be better’. We’ve always felt we could do anything we wanted. It was just based on what our priorities are.”

“I think we’ve got the risks pretty well characterized. I think we are at least avoiding the mistakes that have been made in the past.”

“We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.”

“Are we not natural creatures? Are we not evolved, too? Surely all the lessons we’ve learned in the past century come to a single point: we have to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow apart from nature, and recognise that we’re inseparable from it.”