Experience is a wonderful teacher, but one whose lessons come too late. - Gene Wolfe

They based their extrapolations on numbers. That worked as long as money, which is easily measured numerically, was the principle motivating force in human affairs. But as time progressed, human actions became responsive instead to a multitude of incommensurable vectors.

Could he have murdered a child?
He decided that he could not, but that he could certainly have been accused of having done it and worse. Anyone these days—any man, particularly—could be accused of anything by anyone.

No man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one—a place where he can go and lock the door behind him.