"Yes! That's it exactly!" Septimus replied enthusiastically, truly caught up, now. His whole demeanour had changed from the cool and aloof professor to the eager student of heretical theories that he was at heart. He was totally oblivious to Keith's underlying offense. For a man so brilliant in other respects, Septimus was remarkably prone to ignore subtle social cues when and as he chose. And, in any case, he was far too pleased at the moment. It was so rare that he found someone who shared his opinions on the subject, and even rarer that he found anyone willing to listen while he expounded on them.
" 'One man's magic is another man's engineering' to quote Robert Heinlein, though, as a rule, I don't." Septimus was mostly disparraging of fiction in general, and science fiction in particular, but even he was forced to admit that there was something ingenius about the man. He'd rarely encountered any mundane human with so intuitive an understanding of the world in all its self-weary cynicism.
"Can you imagine the reaction if you had suggested only a hundred years ago that men would fly? That they would walk on the moon? Incredible! And yet there it is, and without the slightest intervention from us.... oh, give or take a nudge here and there."