Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative o… - T. H. White

Everything not forbidden is compulsory.

Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe — his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin-pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction.

If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?