We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil. - Ursula K. Le Guin

"How do I know," she said at last, "that you are what you seem to be?"
"You don't," Said he. "I don't know what I seem, to you."

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.