Medusa

“In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature will make fools of themselves, because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and literary reviewers ran around shrieking about its incredible originality. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres, children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story, plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching a TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, “But this is delicious! Unheard of! What genius invented it?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

“Everybody says they want to live in peace; everybody says they don’t want to go to no war. Nobody wants to spend every waking moment looking to be killed or having to kill somebody to keep from getting killed. That’s what you would think. But what humans do is just that. All the time. So no matter how it makes you feel, no matter what folks say about war and killing, we’re all lying to ourselves and everybody else. It’s all one big everlasting lie. When I know this, it don’t feel right even thinking about a thing so far off as happiness. Something way down inside of me feels like it’s dripping and damp and completely evil. I know I am a animal that can talk and there ain’t nothing that will ever save me nor no one else. This is what we are, and until we die, it’s all we are. A savage animal that can talk.”
― Robert Bausch, Far as the Eye Can See

“The curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.”
― Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart

“Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgetting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire