To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was "system," an indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy… - Isaac Asimov

Enquanto se acreditar nisso, procurador, e enquanto nós da Terra formos tratados como párias, vocês encontrarão em nós as características às quais se opõem.

Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.
So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

The trouble is that I am one of that common breed of human being who finds it very easy to strew noble little homilies far and wide but considerably less easy to follow those homilies himself.