“[Fiction] Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface.”

“Never trust a shiny surface. They hide a multitude of flaws.”

“I like how you don't hide your problems like everyone else, and I don't have to hide mine when I'm around you.”

“Everyone knows how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as a meritocratic system is. The first criterion of loyalty to any organization is therefore complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power. … As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true.”

“We're all people", he said simply. "It doesn't matter if you're two, thirty-two, or ninety-two. Everyone wants to be treated with respect. Everyone wants to feel like they matter in this world.”

“Respect is how to treat everyone, not just those you want to impress.”

“Happiness does not hide secrets. It is open for anyone to obtain and enjoy. It's just that not everyone knows how to get and enjoy it.”

“Let us not entirely abandon Occam’s Razor! The possible, no matter how unlikely, is always to be preferred to the impossible, however appealing.”

“All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”

“Everyone should be respected by the law, and everyone should respect the law.”