How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Line)
Quote #1
And then it was ringing midnight, and they were in the Martian time slip, the thirty-nine-and-a-half-minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, when all the clocks were blank or stopped moving. This was how the first hundred had decided to reconcile Mars's slightly longer day with the twenty-four-hour clock, and the solution had proved oddly satisfactory. (1.2.136)
The clock: the greatest of mankind's rulers. But for forty minutes every night on Mars, time seems to be the ruler of no one. We say seems because the whole time gap thing is kind of just another rule.
Quote #2
The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,384 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations in Transit to Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it. They were, the tome suggested, something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intratribal mating. (2.2.81)
In over a thousand pages of rules, you of course have to have one dedicated to sex. The question is how they expect to enforce that page when their scientists are millions of miles away.
Quote #3
"We can never be self-sufficient unless we do terraforming," [Arkady] pointed out. "We need to terraform in order to make the planet ours, so that we will have the material basis for independence." (3.6.78)
Arkady knows that if you're dependent on others, then you're dependent on their rules as well. Clearly he's had his fair share of terrible bosses and even more terrible jobs.