Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.

Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.

We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.

Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.

Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit.

The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.

Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.