Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order. - Ursula K. Le Guin

The more defensive a society, the more conformist.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

I tried to speak insipidly, yet everything I said seemed to take on a double meaning.