"It's amazing how large the things are that it's possible to overlook."

--

Source : Jo Walton (2011). “Among Others”, p.34, Macmillan

Jo Walton

“People are, well, only human. We know that. The rule of law is borne out in identifying, condemning, and punishing those who violate the standards on which we all agree. This is exactly what we do in America.”
“Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.”
“It is to those who have the most need of us that we ought to show our love more especially.”
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

Source : United States. President (1945-1953 : Truman), Harry S. Truman (1961). “Harry S. Truman: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1945-53”
“Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.”
“The importance of immobility and silence to photographic authority, the nonfilmic nature of this authority, leads me to some remarks on the relationship of photography with death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, they figure it.”
“Socialism may be worthless as a scheme, but it is not meaningless as a symptom. Rousseau's theory of the origin of society, of the social contract, and of a cure for all the social evils by a return to a state of nature, had, as we all know now, no more relation to fact than the dreams of an illiterate drunkard; but they were not without value as a vague and symbolical expression of certain evils from which the France of his day was suffering.”
“Don't be too severe in criticizing people's faults; consider how much they can bear. Don't be too lofty in enjoining virtue, so people may be able to follow.”

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