I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the w… - Philip Pullman

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know

This is a deep and uncomfortable paradox, which will not have escaped you: we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic.

Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

But they expected nothing else: she was very young.