You know, I am not a pacifist...I fought in the War of Independence, and I have covered several wars, including Yom Kippur on the Golan Heights, as a… - Shulamith Hareven

Let us recall the precise role myth plays in society: it inhibits change. Perhaps that is its raison d'être.

Any given discipline contains a majority of priests and a minority of prophets, and the eternal question is who prevails.

To be able to one day change a harsh reality, we need to know how to define what needs to be changed and how to effect change. To cope with situations in life-both personal and public-we need to have a real picture of these situations and of their possible outcomes. We need to know the price of each and who will pay it in the end. To know that every act and every error has consequences. To reduce to a minimum the possibility that someone-the regime, or the press, or the local leadership-will deceive us, cram us with false "facts" that are appropriate to whoever is making use of them. To make quite sure that, in the highest possible percentage of cases, we can make our own decisions and not let someone else think for us. All these things require a constant and precise mapping of reality. In other words, they require information about what exists and what is possible.