6. “That’s insane,” Lanier said. “No very. It’s politics.” - Greg Bear

Poetry is dead and buried in a world of growing LitVid and illiteracy, vidiocy I’ve heard it called. Being dead, poetry has enormous freedom; being ignored, it can blossom like a rose in a manure heap. Poetry is risen. Poetry is the messiah of literature but the angel has not yet told anybody it is risen.

Populists believed the people should dictate their needs to any individual who rose above the herd, and bring them low again—except of course for the leaders of whatever populist government took power, who, as political messiahs, would earn specific privileges themselves.

11. “Nobody’s ever satisfied with what they have?”
“Not in human experience; not at the level of governments, nations, or planets.”