“Legends travel on rainbow wings and sport gaudy colors,” the harbormaster answered him, “while truth plods on in sober garb.” - Fritz Leiber

They, like many priests, had been much too fanatical and not nearly as clever as the god they served.

Work and pray,
Live on hay.
You’ll get pie
In the sky
When you die—
It’s a lie!

I suppose that every blundering idealist who hasn’t been brought face to face with the hard facts of life carries, at the back of his mind, a sneaking suspicion that villainy is a very dashing and romantic thing. When your mind turned turtle, or when they turned it for you, your new personality was necessarily fabricated out of all your fragmentary romantic notions of villainy—unlimited ambition and conceit, absolute lack of emotion, and all the rest of the supervillain ideology!