Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

What are you, child, that you need time to learn about yourself?

Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate.

There's hope left in these dusty chords. There's a song left in our rusty hearts. We are torn and frayed but love remains.

She looked at patches of blackness. Black is a blind remembering, she thought.

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.