"You never disappoint me." Hagbard said. "If they ever hang you, you'll be arguing about whether the rope really exists until the last minute."

"That was a simple riddle used by Zen Masters in the training of monks, Joe remembered. You take a newborn gosling and slip it through the neck of a bottle. Month after month you keep it in there and feed it, until it is a fullgrown goose and can no longer be passed through the bottles neck. The question is: Without breaking the bottle, how do you get the goose out?"

"Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing but acceptance of everybody elses notion of reality. But nobody's perception of reality is the same as everybody's notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the real schizophrenic. It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of one's own age. The first man to think a new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, the are like tiny, imperceptible mutations that may eventually lead to new species. That's why cultural cross-fertilization is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knight Templar meet the Hashishin, something new is born. The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant."