I find it interesting how many of you, when watching a plan go awry, are so blinded by your frustration that you are unable to learn from what you ha… - Charles E. Gannon

Battles are lost because a combatant stops fighting too soon; wars are lost because a combatant does not stop fighting soon enough.

Worse yet, he still had to remind himself that sensations—such as tonight’s skin-cooling sea breeze—were just a blizzard of electric impulses, tricking his brain, his nerves.
Which, he had begun to fear, might not just be the endgame for Dornaani civilization. It could be in humanity’s future as well. Conceivably, those seeds were latent in electricity itself. Given how it ultimately expanded each individual’s sphere of contact and control, its utility was inseparable from the allure of its power. We summon heat and light without having to create it ourselves. We communicate across continents and oceans. We operate machines that labor in our stead. We keep opponents at a safe distance with remote sensors and drones. Is that how the long, subtle slide into speciate senescence began, that the more a species distanced itself from direct action, the more unfamiliar the natural environment became?

Bigotry was not only invulnerable to the appeals of logic and deduction; it was often blind to counterproofs such as those Yaargraukh had just witnessed.