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Awe and absurdity all wrapped up together: that was Wilson's engaging, infectious vision of the universe.

Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce,
even an illusionist's trick; but all, if they are truly wise and not merely
intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which
we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed
before the curtain rises.

The governments of the world will never
catch us, because free men are always cleverer than slaves, and any man who
works for a government is a slave.

We've got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or
any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come
to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the
beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic
whether he worships God or the Devil. We're outside the system's categories.
You'll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth
imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label
for us, we're political non-Euclideans. But even that's not true. Sink me,
nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what
the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam.

"Everybody is
a nice guy, underneath it all," he said. "What we become when the
world is through messing us over is something else."

"I am also puzzled," Sam Three Arrows said finally. "I worked,
long ago, in New York City, in construction, like many young men of the Mohawk
Nation. I found that whites were often like us, and I could not hate them one at
a time. But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak from the
heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on
the movie screen. They play roles. And their leaders are not like our leaders.
They are not chosen for virtue, but for their skill at playing roles. Whites
have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their leaders, and yet they
follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished. Then, also, the
leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too
often. But the worst thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders
have lost it and they have lost mercy. They speak from somewhere else. They act
from somewhere else. But from where? Like you, I do not know. It is, I think, a
kind of insanity." He looked at Hagbard and added politely. "Some are
different."