A Guilty System Recognizes No Innocents.

Intellectual Achievement. The Exercise Of Skill. Human Feeling.

Torture Is Such A Slippery Slope; As Soon As You Allow A Society Or Any Legal System To Do That, Almost Instantly You Get A Situation Where People Are Being Tortured For Very Trivial Reasons.

Half The Fun Of Writing A Novel Is Finding Out From Other People Later On What You Actually Meant.

It Was A Truism That All Civilizations Were Basically Neurotic Until They Made Contact With Everybody Else And Found Their Place Within The Ever-changing Meta-civilisation Of Other Beings, Because, Until Then, During The Stage When They Honestly Believed They Might Be Entirely Alone In Existence, All Solo Societies Were Possessed Of Both An Inflated Sense Of Their Own Importance And A Kind Of Existential Terror At The Sheer Scale And Apparent Emptiness Of The Universe.

One Of The Advantages Of Having Laws Is The Pleasure One May Take In Breaking Them.