Betsy Hagestedt

“What are the environment? Don’t you think that’s something worth protesting for?”
Ryan was slow to answer; the sadness was again in his voice. “If we cannot raise our level of sanity to the point that we care about other humans, about our own species, we will never learn to care about all the other species we share this planet with.”
― Harold R. Johnson, Corvus

“Richard had taken his time to answer. “Mega-corps don’t exist, or at least they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t buy into them.”
“Bullshit. It wasn’t that long ago. You’re forgetting about the militias.”
“No, I remember them all too clearly. I was in a militia before I joined the regular force. It wasn’t the corporation committing war crimes. It was us on the ground.”
“Acting on orders.”
“Doesn’t matter. It was still us. We give them the power they have, we carried the guns. The corporation only exists because we believe it does. We used to believe in dragons and unicorns, now we believe in Monster Incorporated.”
― Harold R. Johnson, Corvus

“We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.
Because anger at having been wronged—the rage, the fury, the desire to lash out and cut back—doesn’t just vanish because you say to someone, “I forgive you.” Rather, forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

“[…]any tool can also be a weapon of oppression as easily as it can be an implement of construction.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night