“We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.”

“Sometimes the most worthwhile things are right in front of our eyes. We just make them hard because we think that gives them more value.”

“Wouldn't it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true and we could live in them?”

“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?”

“We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.”

“We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music”

“What we don’t understand on either front is that the more pressure we put on our pests, the more we cause them to evolve around the pressure. The pressure is evolutionary pressure; what we fail to understand is evolution itself.”

“… when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.”

“The task facing ARAs is daunting: we must empty the cages, not make them larger.”