Maia lifted her gaze to watch low clouds briefly occult a brightly speckled, placid sea, its green shoals aflicker with silver schools of fish and th… - David Brin

Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same thing — that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty. That one can never know complete truth about physical reality via our senses alone. Much is made of the differences between their systems... Socrates teaching reason, Buddha urging meditation, and Jesus prescribing faith. But what they all had in common was far more important. Each of those sage-prophets worried that the power of human egotism tends to make us lie to ourselves, leading to error, hypocrisy, and all too often, the rationalization of evil actions.

Far worse than bribery is blackmail. Whether a person was originally entrapped in some small misjudgment, or willingly did something awful, the man who is blackmailed is far easier for evil ones to control than someone who is merely greedy or venial.

Loneliness, her arch enemy, never seemed content.