Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum [...] But what did it mean? I said. What?, he said. Oh, it meant 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'. I guess we thought we were pretty smart back then.

Becka had a lot of these control-yourself techniques. I tried to practise them. They worked some of the time.

Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century — no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been.

What men are most afraid of is not lions, not snakes, not the dark, not women. Not any more. What men are most afraid of is the body of another man. Men's bodies are the most dangerous things on earth.

People who feared IBM were wrong, ... Technology is ever-changing.

You can't walk in faith and fear at the same time.

The best time to set up a new discipline is when the idea is strong.

The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.

With vision there is no room to be frightened. No reason for intimidation. It's time to march forward! Let's be confident and positive!