“Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.”

“Everywhere these inventions of science by ignorant misuse of a new technique were wiping out the artist.”

“Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta Stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from one-eyed falsehood.”

“As the history majors among you here today know all too well, when people in power invent their own facts and attack those who question them, it can mark the beginning of the end of a free society. That is not hyperbole. It is what authoritarian regimes throughout history have done. They attempt to control reality. Not just our laws and our rights and our budgets, but our thoughts and beliefs.”

“But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new "things."”

“There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate.”

“Oh, the things we invent when we are scared
and want to be rescued.”

“I’m used to that. It often seems to me that’s all detective work is — wiping out your false starts and beginning again.”

“She refused to think of Neil, brave and quiet, whose reward for a heroic rescue was to be slowly devoured by strange cave balloons.”

“It was heroic!"
"Heroic, is it? Bedad, it's epic! Ye begin to perceive the breadth and depth of my genius.”