Mike

“Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“The trick was to pick out what was important, and never, ever to forget that the map was not the territory.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game

“It is a peculiarity of English travellers that they do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“History isn’t a narrative. There’s nothing tidy about it. There’s nothing clear about its margins. It’s an infiltrated, interlocking mess, and there are other systers whose brains are much more adapted to dealing with the fact that reality is not a story than humans are. Humans make a lot of terrible mistakes because we rely so heavily on narrative to understand the world. It allows our brains to be hacked by convincing fairy tales, to be hijacked by memes whether they have any objective reality or not. We probably needed rightminding more than most species just to remind us that stories are not the truth, even when they feel like the truth. Even when they suit all our biases and reinforce all our prejudices.”
― Elizabeth Bear, The Folded Sky