Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope … the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all. - Clifford D. Simak

What is a bow and arrow?
It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war.
It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering.
It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.
It is a symbol of a way of life.

Now it seemed that this had been a self-sustained illusion he had nourished carefully to bolster a sense of his own importance.

Ulysses, he thought, had not told him all the truth about the Talisman. He had told him that it had disappeared and that the galaxy was without it, but he had not told him that for many years its power and glory had been dimmed by the failure of its custodian to provide linkage between the people and the force. And all that time the corrosion occasioned by that failure had eaten away at the bonds of the galactic cofraternity.