I know you’re an unrepentant curmudgeon! You live to get a rise out of people, and someday your contrary habits will be your undoing. - David Brin

I threw the other garment over my head and let its black drapery flow over my arms, down past my waist. From the outside, I now looked like some shrouded creature from those dark days, half a century ago, when a third of the countries on Earth forced women to veil their faces and forms under shapeless tents of muslin and gauze.

Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true — in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals.

The good side of the world media village was the sense it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely new.