No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.

If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.

I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist.

My lungs taste the air of Time,Blown past falling sands.

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.