"History, of course, is never real. People either glorify it or horrify it. Or at the very least color it."

“When all else fails, start running!”

“Kind of like love before first sight.” and “Butterflies in your stomach. That was such a crappy metaphor. More like killer bees.”

“To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.”

“What would you be like if you had white hair and had not given up your principles? It might be wise as you deal with coalition efforts to think about the possibilities of going for fifty years.”

“Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there's no hierarchy.”

“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

“Islam explicitly rejects dictatorship and there are no traditions of the Prophet or passages in the Qur'an which clearly give dictators this support.”

“Change is freedom, change is life. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”