One voice, speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time. - Ursula K. Le Guin

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies...

“Do you mean,” Lidi said in a tone of deep existential disgust, “that we have to believe in it to make it work?”
“You have to believe in yourself in order to act, don’t you?” Tai said.
“No,” the navigator said. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in myself. I know some things. Enough to go on.”

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it’s true. Children know that. Adults know it too and that’s precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.

He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, 'Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.