the burden of the thinking man is to calculate the probable good against the possible bad and to decide whether the change will be worth the risk. - James A. Michener

Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly.

I sought out men who’d had unusual experiences or more likely had usual ones that they understood with unusual clarity, and from this melange of information and observation I acquired a good perception of what the great Pacific adventure meant in human terms. Clearly, almost clinically, I concluded that if you ordered all the young men of a generation to climb Mount Everest, you would expect the climb to have a major significance in their lives. And while they were climbing the damned mountain they would bitch like hell and condemn the assignment, but years later, as they looked back, they’d see it as the supreme adventure it was and they’d want to read about it to reexperience it.
These thoughts led to a clear-cut conviction: Years from now the men who complain most loudly out here will want to explain to others what it was like. I’m sure of it, so I’m going to write down as simply and honestly as I can what it was really like. And I reassured myself: No one knows the Pacific better than I do; no one can tell the story more accurately. This was not a boast; it was true and relevant to the task I planned to set myself.” — Chapter VIII, “Writing”, page 265

He was reminded that men may be angels, but they are animals, too. They are driven by uncontrollable forces and only the love of other people makes it possible for them to survive. Men are lonely and are stricken in the night. They lock their jaws against themselves. They scream like animals, and even though they ridicule love and the forces of destruction, they are themselves theatres for the operation of such forces.