“I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.”

“I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.”

“People at large were not enjoying an intellectual awakening where so recently they had succumbed to superstitious panic.”

“When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.”

“My thesis, paradoxically, and a little provocatively, but nonetheless genuinely, is simply this : PROBABILITY DOES NOT EXIST.The abandonment of superstitious beliefs about the existence of Phlogiston, the Cosmic Ether, Absolute Space and Time, …, or Fairies and Witches, was an essential step along the road to scientific thinking. Probability, too, if regarded as something endowed with some kind of objective existence, is no less a misleading misconception, an illusory attempt to exteriorize or materialize our true probabilistic beliefs.”

“You might also see why it seemed a bit odd, to Radchaai ears, to hear someone who believed gravity wells were the land of the dead call people superstitious for worshiping a lizard.”

“Got your text,” he said when I climbed out. “How much did it hurt?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Apparently, I can’t get a tattoo because I’m a witch.”
“I could have told them-” He stopped. “Oh, you said witch.”
“Ha-ha.”

“Witches aren’t like that. We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.”

“If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted then they are for civill Obedience.”

“Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.”