Brian Parris

“a civilization shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people – for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“Who owns the patent on this vaccine?'
'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
― Jonas Salk

“witness two scenes. In one, an angry, bitter man beats another man to death in an alley in the Gadrobi District. In the other, a man of vast wealth conspires with equally wealthy compatriots to raise yet again the price of grain, making the cost of simple bread so prohibitive that families starve, are led into lives of crime, and die young. Are both acts of violence?”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays