I opened the packet and extracted the cards. They were on the order of tarots, with their wands, pentacles, cups, and swords, but the Greater Trumps were quite different.
I can’t solve all my problems right here in the present. I can’t hope to solve the problems of the future.
We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
“Yoyodyne! Where the future begins tomorrow!”
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
Not that I’m advocating gorilla stacking, mind you.
Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!
But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure. Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth’s caretakers.
I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven’t seen that. But I know they don’t spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.
In intelligence work we have to go by capabilities, not by intentions. If a potential enemy can do something to you, you have to prepare for it, without regard to what you think he wants to do.
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.
Oh. Could I have horses at my funeral, like Granda?
You know Grandpa goes around and he does his business in public because grandpa isn’t shady.
Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr. “I’m my own grandpa”!
We always do what’s natural, only sometimes we shouldn’t do it.
.“It is our choices that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
As a compromise, there was talk at the time about guardrails. We didn’t want guardrails, wasn’t the whole and entire point?
We’re trying to keep the city in one piece, pinhead. Eighty rails ain’t gonna do it!
There is but one City in all the world. Ever it travels across the face of the Earth, both as promise and as curse. None of us shall but glimpse It from the corner of one eye during our lifetimes.