This vain presumption, of understanding everything, can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just on… - Kim Stanley Robinson

It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”

We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.