It said, “Ask, what is man?” Mechanically, he asked it. “Man is a blind alley in evolution, who came too late to compete, who has always been control… - Fredric Brown

“Please concentrate on how the system is governed.”
Crag let his mind think about the two parties—both equally crooked and corrupt—that ran the planets between them, mostly by cynical horse trading methods that betrayed the common people on both sides. The Guilds and the Syndicates—popularly known as the Guilds and the Gildeds—one purporting to represent capital and the other purporting to represent labor, but actually betraying it at every opportunity. Both parties getting together to rig elections so they might win alternately and preserve an outward appearance of a balance of power and a democratic government. Justice, if any, obtainable only by bribery. Objectors or would-be reformers—and there weren’t many of either—eliminated by the hired thugs and assassins both parties used. Strict censorship of newspapers, radio and television, extending even to novels lest a writer attempt to slip in a phrase that might imply that the government under which he lived was less than perfect.

“One may think,” said the professor, “of an absolute as a mode of being—”
Yeah, thought Shorty McCabe, one may think of anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache.

He could see now what a lot of his mistakes had been—laziness among them. And laziness is curable.