“While the group of real strategists at RAND probably never numbered more than about 25 people, the overall quality, in sheer intelligence and intellectual breadth, is simply astonishing.”

“…even more ominous … is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. … he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals … A visual is more interested in style than in content … A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.”

“When this book was first conceived (more than 25 years ago) few mathematicians outside the Soviet Union recognized probability as a legitimate branch of mathematics.”

“If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.”

“If Black people had simply accepted a status of economic and political inferiority, the mob murders would probably have subsided. But because vast numbers of ex-slaves refused to discard their dreams of progress, more than ten thousand lynchings occurred during the three decades following the war.”

“How ‘real’ it is one feels when trying to form other groups…Most people will never get this other grouping as clear, stable, and optically real as the former one.”

“Organizations endure, however, in proportion to the breadth of the morality by which they are governed. Thus the endurance of organization depends upon the quality of leadership; and that quality derives from the breadth of the morality upon which it rests.”

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.”

“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.”

“It was fairly evident that at least 90 per cent of all magic, probably more, was balderdash and sheer mystification.”